Industry-funded research takes on a larger role on a cash-strapped campus

At UC Berkeley, Pfizer sponsors research into drug development strategy. Intel supports secure computing research. Novartis backs research targeting “undruggable diseases.” More and more, the funders of UC Berkeley research are of a corporate, and not public, character.

A campus struggling for cash, UC Berkeley has been turning to private industry to fund its research. In an era in which government support of public universities continues to lag, some see the growth of these deals as a welcome source of revenue, while others believe that it impairs the public spirit of a public university.

With new deals nearly every month, UC Berkeley’s ties to industry continue to grow.

Industry money made up about 9 percent of all new research awards in fiscal year 2017, totaling about $72 million in funding. That’s more than doubled since 2007, when the campus brought in about $32 million in industry funds.

The companies involved with UC Berkeley run the gamut from electronics company Samsung to tobacco giant Altria (previously known as Philip Morris). In fiscal years 2014 to 2016, the largest corporate awarders were the German chemicals company BASF, Aduro Biotech, BP and Intel.

UC Berkeley

organization

or department

Industry

sponsor

Chemistry

BASF

Nutritional

sciences and

toxicology

Chemicals

Center for

Environmental

Design

Research

Aduro

Biotech Inc.

Cancer

Research Lab

Bio-

technology

School of

Public

Health

programs

Energy

Biosciences

Institute

BP

Oil/Gas

Chemical &

biomolecular

engineering

EECS

Intel

Technology

ERSO

Center for

Effective

Global Action

Wellspring

Advisors LLC

Consultancy

Institute of

International

Studies

School of Law

Pfizer

California

Institute for

Quantitative

Biosciences

Pharm-

aceuticals

Innovative

Genomics

Initiative

Industry sponsor

UC Berkeley organization or department

Chemistry

BASF

Chemicals

Nutritional sciences and

toxicology

Center for Environmental

Design Research

Cancer Research Lab

Aduro Biotech Inc.

Biotechnology

School of Public Health

programs

Energy Biosciences

Institute

BP

Oil/Gas

Chemical &

biomolecular engineering

EECS

Intel

Technology

ERSO

Center for Effective

Global Action

Wellspring

Advisors LLC

Consultancy

Institute of

International Studies

School of Law

Pfizer

Pharmaceuticals

California Institute for

Quantitative Biosciences

Innovative

Genomics Initiative

Industry sponsor

UC Berkeley organization or department

Chemistry

BASF

Chemicals

Nutritional sciences and

toxicology

Center for Environmental

Design Research

Aduro Biotech Inc.

Cancer Research Lab

Biotechnology

School of Public Health

programs

Energy Biosciences

Institute

BP

Oil/Gas

Chemical &

biomolecular engineering

EECS

Intel

Technology

ERSO

Center for Effective

Global Action

Wellspring

Advisors LLC

Consultancy

Institute of

International Studies

School of Law

Pfizer

Pharmaceuticals

California Institute for

Quantitative Biosciences

Innovative

Genomics Initiative

Click to explore the full list of the industry sponsors of research at UC Berkeley

The vast majority of private funding went to STEM fields. For every dollar that was awarded to STEM recipients from 2014 to 2016, less than 3 cents were awarded to non-STEM recipients.

The money is scattered across a patchwork of programs. Some are small affiliate programs, where companies attach their names to a project and get some access, like 3M and LG’s partnerships with the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center.

Others are multi-million dollar research institutes, in which a company plays a role in determining the research agenda and holds privileges to license the results — such as is the case with the California Research Alliance, sponsored by BASF.

“There are huge intellectual capabilities that exist in universities that these companies wouldn’t otherwise have access to,” said John Coates, campus professor of microbiology and director of the Energy Biosciences Institute, which receives money from oil and chemical companies.

Many of these partnerships aren’t reciprocal, either. Programs can take on industry funding through gifts, meaning the companies aren’t owed anything in return. The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, or CITRIS, receives most of its industry funding this way, according to its director, Costas Spanos. Additionally, companies and researchers can share data and materials with each other without entering into a formal funding arrangement.

As for successes from these programs, the partnerships have led to everything from printable batteries to entire new companies.

A fiscal reality

Some companies fund research because they want to hire the graduate students in a certain lab. Others want to be one of the first to see a lab’s research. Universities have the capacity to do research that companies can’t, according to Eric Giegerich, director of the campus’s Industry Alliances Office, which means that a school like UC Berkeley can fill a gap in a company’s research portfolio.

The growth of privately sponsored research at UC Berkeley stems from an undeniable reality: The campus needs money. Just more than one month after Chancellor Carol Christ came into office, she announced a series of wide-ranging budget cuts coupled with a push for new sources of revenue, which the campus believes will cut its perennial deficit from $110 million to about $60 million.

And although industry funding has grown in recent years, it’s nowhere close to the research funding campus receives from the federal government, nonprofits or even just the state of California. In 2017, those three sources made up $746 million in new funding, about 10 times what came from private industry.

In a recent interview, Paul Alivisatos, the new executive vice chancellor and provost, said he and Christ wanted to use industry sponsorship, among other revenue sources, to expand the faculty by 100.

“Our funding models are changing because how we connect to society is changing, too,” Alivisatos said. “I think what we have to have is the ethos of a public university, but not necessarily such a static funding model as what existed for a long time.”

Markets matter

The presence of the some of America’s largest and most controversial corporations on campus is not without its road bumps.

In 2007, British Petroleum America announced a 10-year, $500 million investment into a biofuel research institute led by UC Berkeley, the Energy Biosciences Institute. It was a landmark deal at the time and one of the largest single investments a company had ever made in university research.

Total

research

funding

Corporate donors

Other sources

$1 billion

Corporate donors accounted for 8.5% of total research funding in FY 2017

$800 million

$600 million

BP’s sponsorship of the Energy Biosciences Institute made up most corporate research funding in FY 2008

$400 million

$200 million

$0

FY ‘07

FY ‘09

FY ‘11

FY ‘13

FY ‘15

FY ‘17

Total

research

funding

Corporate donors

Other sources

$1 billion

Corporate donors accounted

for 8.5 percent of total research funding in FY 2017

BP’s sponsorship of the Energy Biosciences Institute made up most corporate research funding in FY 2008

$800 million

$600 million

$400 million

$200 million

$0

FY 2007

FY 2009

FY 2011

FY 2013

FY 2015

FY 2017

Total

research

funding

Corporate donors

Other sources

Corporate donors accounted for 8.5 percent of total research funding in FY 2017

$1 billion

BP’s sponsorship of the Energy Biosciences Institute made up most corporate research funding in FY 2008

$800 million

$600 million

$400 million

$200 million

$0

FY 2007

FY 2007

FY 2008

FY 2009

FY 2010

FY 2011

FY 2012

FY 2013

FY 2014

FY 2015

FY 2016

FY 2017

Flanked by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Birgeneau, the chancellor at the time, called it “our generation’s moonshot” and said it signaled an end to the era of fossil fuels.

Eight years later, BP turned away from biofuels and mostly left UC Berkeley. Plummeting oil prices and lagging biofuel development led BP to pull most of its funding, from $35 million per year to about $5 million per year. Research was shelved, and staff members were laid off.

Today, EBI is a smaller version of its old self, but it has some new funding from Shell and American Pacific, a chemicals company. It’s not uncommon for research to stall or fizzle out, but BP’s actions speak to a reality of industry-funded research: Markets matter.

Conflicts of interest

Concerns about these agreements go beyond market-tailored funding. In 1998, Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis struck a five-year, $25 million research deal with the plant and microbial biology department. The deal, controversial at the time, was prominently opposed by Ignacio Chapela, then an assistant professor of microbial ecology.

When Chapela was up for tenure in 2002, he was approved almost unanimously by an ad hoc tenure committee. But later, the chair of that committee resigned, and Chapela was denied tenure by a different committee — one with faculty connected to the Novartis deal.

An external review by Michigan State University said there was “little doubt” the Novartis deal played a role in denying Chapela tenure.

The campus is aware of the concerns over corporate influence that arise when a company such as BP or ExxonMobil sponsors research, and it has set up checkpoints to make sure the deals follow UC policy, Giegerich said. Every proposal is vetted for conflicts of interest, and companies are not allowed to conduct secret research on campus. (This doesn’t necessarily apply to work done by private employees on campus space leased to a company, which is uncommon but occurred at EBI.)

“We’re not staff scientists,” Coates said. “We’re not a scientific wing of industry.”

Companies are also not allowed to dictate what scientists research or publish. Both sides have to agree before any research begins.

“It’s a win-win situation,” said Peidong Yang, director of the California Research Alliance and campus professor of chemistry. In 2014, BASF partnered with UC Berkeley to create the California Research Alliance, which sponsors projects at public and private universities across California. Four BASF scientists work in its headquarters in Hildebrand Hall.

“BASF brings in scientific and technology problems, and Berkeley will bring in the expertise,” Yang said.

In exchange, BASF gets the right of first refusal to license technology from the UC, meaning that it gets the first chance to negotiate a licensing agreement with the university. The university owns the patents that result from all research done on campus, even if it is industry-sponsored.

“I think it’s possible to serve the public good and the interest of the company at the same time,” Giegerich said. “We don’t want to be serving the interests of the company only and not serving the public good.”

‘Selling out’

But there are others who see the growth of these deals as the university giving away too much to corporate interests. In a 2010 report on oil companies’ partnerships with American universities (including UC Berkeley), Jennifer Washburn, formerly of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said these types of agreements cede more power to industry than academic principles recommend.

Washburn was critical of the 2007 BP-EBI deal in the report, stating that it held numerous “potential conflict-of-interest concerns” and that its structure seemed to erode academic autonomy.

Of the top 50 corporate sponsors, technology companies have poured the most money into UC Berkeley research over the last three years, compared to sponsors from other industries

The concerns stretch beyond academic control. Christopher Newfield, professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, said that because universities pay significant unreimbursed, behind-the-scenes administrative costs of private research partnerships, they end up subsidizing corporate research.

“The budget model for funding research is broken, and (subsidies are) slowly bankrupting public universities,” Newfield said.

The process for handling industry partnerships is sound, though, Newfield said, because it depends on the faculty themselves to regulate it.

So, the campus has to watch itself to avoid “selling out,” according to Spanos, who is also a campus professor of EECS.

“It could happen if we’re not careful,” Spanos said.

Explore the industry sponsorships funding UC Berkeley research

Hover over a link to see the money flowing from an industry sponsor to a UC Berkeley recipient, aggregated over fiscal years 2014 to 2016.

The list below shows the industry sponsors of each UC Berkeley recipient. Money is aggregated over fiscal years 2014 to 2016.