Rausser pursued several strategic alliances, the most important of which was the alliance with the Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute in 1998. Novartis invested $25 million over five years devoted to plant and microbial technology in exchange for first right to negotiate for licenses on a percentage (30% in the first year of contract) of patentable discoveries coming from research; the university maintains ownership of all research results and patents.
Research emerging from this private-public partnership led to a number of discoveries, including (i) an isolation of a natural-occurring resistant gene in peppers and introduced into tomatoes, making them also invulnerable to a particular pathogen; (ii) discovery of a protein in wheat and dairy that can be manipulated to make these products easier to digest and less allergenic; (iii) identification of a gene that controlled the size that plant organs that can be altered to yield plant with larger seeds, harboring more starch and protein; and (iv) discovery of a common form of algae that can produce substantial amounts of hydrogen gas, a potentially major clean energy source of the future.
This agreement was the foundation for several public-private university partnerships in plant biotechnology and other areas of plant sciences that led in subsequent years to more than a billion dollars of private-sector funding. The agreement also inspired the establishment of the Energy and Biosciences Institute (EBI) and Integrated Genomic Institute (IGI) at UC Berkeley.