Former Intel chief Andy Grove Fights for Medical Innovation

Former Intel Chief Andy Grove Fights for Medical Innovation

If only medicines could be developed with the same kind of urgency and efficiency that spawned the computer revolution.

That is Grove's dream. A Silicon Valley pioneer-turned-medical activist, Grove, 75, is afflicted with Parkinson's disease. His worsening tremors fuel an impatience, offering daily reminders of the need to speed innovation into fatal neurodegenerative conditions.

"Maybe I'm a Don Quixote," Grove said in a rare interview about his crusade to spur more progress in an industry that every year spends more than $50 billion on research and development yet produces merely 20 new drugs. "I'm just trying to figure out something and move the ball.

"Manage science like a business project," he groused from his office in Los Altos, restless with the arrhythmic dance of dyskinesia. "We do this all the time in industry."

The man who helped usher in the age of personal computing knows that time is short. His disease not only stiffens the gait, but can rob the memory and muffle the voice.

So he has committed $30 million to medical research since 2005. But he doesn't just dole out money and hope for the best. Instead, he pokes and prods, asking hard questions and challenging assumptions, hoping to shorten the long trip of drugs and devices from lab bench to bedside.

Grove's only formal biology lesson was in 1959,

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But his voice -- cranky, provocative, funny and insightful -- now reaches modern medicine's highest echelons.

After a 1995 diagnosis with prostate cancer, currently in remission, then a 2000 diagnosis of Parkinson's, "I became at home with these things," he said, shrugging. "I thought my experience in organizing people might possibly be useful. I didn't feel so ridiculous."

While other CEOs vanish into gold-plated retirements, "I don't play golf. I don't do Sudoku," he said.

"It is good to have things you care about very strongly. It's not so good," he added, wryly, "to acquire them the way I did."

On Monday, Grove will be the keynote speaker at the World Stem Cell Summit in Pasadena. Last week, his editorial calling for expedited clinical trials was featured in the prestigious journal Science. And, previously, he was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

His 2007 speech before the Society for Neuroscience, damning medical bureaucracy for slowing progress, spawned both supporters and angry detractors, triggering a controversy that still reverberates.

Meanwhile, he has designed a more objective test to measure disease progression. He has proposed a way to reform clinical trials so they're faster and need fewer patients. And he wants drug companies, like tech companies, to learn from their failures and build data-driven feedback loops.

"Taking apart a system and analyzing its parts -- that's not a medical process, it's an engineering process," he said.

Responding to his challenge, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley offer a two-year master's degree in "translational medicine," the discipline of transferring lab breakthroughs to the marketplace. The MBA-style program, which Grove helped establish with a $1.5 million donation, targets students from both medical and high-tech fields.

Grove admits that his energy sometimes flags. He no longer enjoys two-week-long overseas business conferences, each day as frenetic as the last.

He handles the disease the way he handles everything else: open and direct. He adopts none of the common tricks employed by sufferers -- clutching a pen, or stuffing hands into pockets -- often used to minimize its visibility. His torso keels with each step, a distorted but determined gait. His arms bob; his fingers fidget.

Growing frustration

Underneath is keen intellect and a growing sense of frustration that medical science has offered him and other patients so little after decades of experimentation.

Consider this: When Grove joined Intel in 1968, the number of transistors on a computer chip was 1,000. When he left as CEO in 1998, it was about 9 million. Today it's more than 2.6 billion. He became famed for what he calls "fast knowledge turns."

Yet the drug that was the mainstay of Parkinson's treatment in the 1960s -- L-dopa -- remains the mainstay today.

In 2001, he wrote an impassioned letter to the director of the National Institutes of Health, offering advice. He got no answer. The director finally left a voice mail message at Grove's ski cabin at Lake Tahoe -- but that was much later. So Grove vowed to fight.

"He's turned his own encounters into problems to be solved," said Robert A. Burgelman, professor of management at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. "He takes a strategic approach.

"He's an extraordinary man, one of the most focused persons I have every come across. Once he comes to an insight, he follows through on it, turning it into action," he said. "And he has an ability to reflect on his own experience and draw insights from that, which is an unusual and powerful thing for leaders to have."

C. Barr Taylor, a longtime friend and Stanford psychiatry professor, described Grove as someone who brings his imagination and intellect to contributions that will help others. "He is able to synthesize the information relevant to his problem, and then make not just a smart personal decision, but think of issues that more generally affect the field," Taylor said.

'Chips are not people'

Some biotech insiders are angered by Grove's dismissal of their dedication to the cause.

"It would be daft to suggest that if biopharma simply followed the lead of the semiconductor industry, all would be well," wrote Kevin Davies in the online journal Bio-IT World.com. "The semiconductor industry doesn't have the complex physiology of the human body -- or the FDA, for that matter, to contend with."

In his blog "In The Pipeline," biochemist Derek Lowe called Grove "rich, famous, smart and wrong." Grove's recent editorial, Lowe said, "is not a crazy idea, but I think it still needs some work. ... The details of it, which slide by very quickly in Grove's article, are the real problems. Aren't they always?"

Grove sighed.

"Sticks and stones. ... There were brutal comments but I don't care. The typical comment is 'Chips are not people, go (expletive) yourself.' But to not look over to the other side to see what other people in other professions have done -- that is a lazy intellectual activity."

He's not naive enough to think that his proposed reforms will come fast enough to save his own life.

"But the best treatment I can get is to be energetic and commit to something," he said. "A little bit of success would be very worthwhile."

Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 408-920-5565.