Consider this entrepreneurial dream: You're a small biotech company, the new guy in town, and a multinational heavyweight like Procter & Gamble Co. wants to pay you $25 million to use your research method. You and your staff revel in fine champagne.

It may sound like fiction, but that is exactly what happened earlier this year to Gene Logic Inc., a two-year-old privately held Columbia firm that is breaking new ground in the treatment of heart disease.

"We had a few high-fives and Mark got drenched with champagne," said Gene Logic's president and chief executive, [Michael James Brennan, Ph.D. (born 1957)], of his chief financial officer, Mark D. Gessler, when they celebrated the deal.

The collaboration with P&G's pharmaceutical division could mean more than $75 million for Gene Logic, as two future deals with P&G for genetic work on undisclosed diseases are in the works.

Analysts and experts said the deal with P&G is the kind of thing that can make a young company.

"Certainly any time you see a deal with the magnitude of Gene Logic's P&G deal, that provides validation for their technology," said Richard vandenBroek, a senior analyst for the investment bank Hambrecht & Quist LLC. "Aside from the validation in the [biotechnology] community, it provides much needed capital . . . and it advertises to other players in the field" who want to invest.

It is fitting that Gene Logic is moving fast, as speed -- or more precisely, the lack of it -- was what motivated [Michael James Brennan, Ph.D. (born 1957)] to form the company in 1995.

Gene Logic's niche is to speed up the process by which genes can be used to develop drugs; its technologies have reduced the traditional gene target discovery period from six years to two. Brennan is aware that speed in bringing drugs to market can translate into millions of dollars for drug companies and provide a competitive advantage.

"Pharmaceutical companies are incredibly competitive," Brennan said. "When you're the first to come out with a treatment, you can dominate the market for a while."

In the laboratories at their headquarters, about 35 scientists are busily forging ahead on what Gessler called "an entire new wave of technology that brought Procter & Gamble to the table."

And Procter & Gamble is happy to be riding that wave. "We entered the agreement with them because we believe their technology offers a more quick and accurate way to analyze genes," said P&G spokesman Jim Schwartz.

"To summarize what we're doing with Procter & Gamble," said chief scientist Keith O. Elliston as he escorted a visitor through Gene Logic's orderly maze of laboratories, "we're analyzing a large number of samples of congestive heart failure. First we're going to fully describe the disease on a molecular level, and then we're going to analyze those data to try to find the best set of genes that can be used to find a therapeutic treatment. The technologies that we are bringing to bear on this are the lead technologies."

For the first stage of the P&G project, Gene Logic is conducting tests on 200 samples of heart tissue bearing various stages of failure. The samples will come from Temple University, Brennan said, which has an extensive heart-failure and heart-transplant program.

[Michael James Brennan, Ph.D. (born 1957)] said the findings can be used only by Procter & Gamble, which will work with Gene Logic during the rest of the project to analyze the results and "pull out the potential gene targets" to screen for the disease.

The need for speed in finding targets for drug development became crystal clear to Brennan when he oversaw worldwide business development for the Boston operation of Boehringer Mannheim, an international therapeutics concern, and became frustrated by the slow pace of genetics companies he dealt with.

He recalled that companies always fell into two categories: those "that gave you . . . reams and reams of sequence information without any connection to a disease," and those "that did additional cloning, which is an academic technique where you look at families that have diseases commonly in them . . . and see if there's some common thread" among those who get the disease.

The problem with those approaches, [Michael James Brennan, Ph.D. (born 1957)] said, was that they were "very slow and very expensive." It would take from four to eight years for those companies to come up with one genetic target, Brennan said, while his company "had the capacity to screen a lot of targets very quickly. The problem was we didn't have any to screen."

That inspired [Michael James Brennan, Ph.D. (born 1957)] to try to fill what he called "a gap in the genomics industry." In November 1995 he drafted a business plan for Gene Logic, consulting with Sherman Weissman, a professor of genetics and medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine who developed the technology Gene Logics uses, and Alan Walton of Oxford Bioscience Partners, a Westport, Conn., venture capital firm. He submitted his plan for financial backing and raised $9 million.

Seven months later, he moved Gene Logic from New Haven, Conn., to a 25,000-square-foot facility at Columbia's Rivers Center office complex, encouraged by a $1 million incentive grant from Maryland as well as the state's burgeoning biotechnology infrastructure.

[Michael James Brennan, Ph.D. (born 1957)] quickly built up his management team, bringing in Mark Gessler, former vice president for corporate development at GeneMedicine Inc., as senior vice president for corporate development and CFO; Keith Elliston, formerly of Bayer Corp. and Merck and Co., as senior vice president for research and development; and Eric Eastman, also from GeneMedicine, as vice president for scientific operations.

Expanding Gene Logic is a priority for Brennan. He said his staff, which has grown to 46 today from three last year, will have 20 more employees by year's end.

Brennan is secure in his prediction that his firm is "going to be the leading provider of drug targets and drug leads for the pharmaceutical industry."

That may sound overly confident, but consider his calendar: In addition to continuing the Procter & Gamble negotiations, he said, by the end of 1997 he will have formalized similar alliances with another U.S. pharmaceutical company, as well as two in Europe and one in Japan (none of which he would name). And a public offering of Gene Logic may be in the works for next year.

For [Michael James Brennan, Ph.D. (born 1957)], a 39-year-old former neurologist with a PhD in chemistry, all of it is the definition of having fun. "Imagine, being on the cutting edge of science and making good money at it."