Mumbai: Harvard has announced exclusive licensing for more than 50 current and pending patents to Nano-Terra, a company co-founded by Whitesides,. In a deal that could transform the little-known start-up into one of nanotechnology''s most closely watched companies.

George M. Whitesides, a Harvard University chemist and a renowned specialist in nanotechnology - a new technology being built on the behavior of materials as small as one molecule thick.

Whitesides and his team amassed the huge patent portfolio at Harvard over the last 25 years based on work in his lab.

"It''s the largest patent portfolio I remember, and it may be our largest ever," said Isaac T. Kohlberg, who has overseen the commercialisation of Harvard''s patent portfolio since 2005.

Nano-Terra, based in Cambridge, Massachusets., said the patent filing and maintenance costs alone top $2 million.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Harvard said it would receive a significant equity stake in Nano-Terra in addition to royalties.

The patents cover methods of manipulating matter at the nanometer and micron scales to create novel surfaces and combinations of materials. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter; a micron is 1,000 times larger (pollen and many single-cell animals are measured in microns).

Such technology could lead to products to make better paints and windows, safer and cleaner chemicals, and more efficient solar panels.

The patents cover virtually all non-biological applications. The biology related research--mostly in health care--had previously been licensed to companies, including Genzyme, GelTex (sold to Genzyme for $1.2 billion in 1993), Theravance and two privately held start-ups, Surface Logix and WMR Biomedical.

Nano-Terra, though, is selling no products. It is just offering manufacturing and design skills in realms where flexibility and low costs are crucial.

The best-known patents cover soft lithography, Whitesides'' method of depositing extremely thin layers of material onto a surface in carefully controlled patterns. It can work over larger surfaces than photolithography, which is widely used to make microchips. Perhaps even more intriguing, soft lithography can work on highly irregular or rounded surfaces where photolithography is all but impossible.