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The New York Times: Andy Grove's Prescription for Health Care

By Andrew Pollack

Andrew S. Grove, the 73-year-old former chief executive of Intel, has long brought a piercing intellect and a personal passion to the subject of health care.

In 1996, Mr. Grove famously wrote a cover story in Fortune magazine, “Taking on Prostate Cancer,” which chronicled his personal research, after he found out he had cancer, into the state of the art of treatments. The piece, most of all, displayed his logical assault on a problem, combining the risk-benefit analysis of a businessman and the technical acumen of a scientist, who is the author of a widely used text, “Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices.” And after Mr. Grove was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at 64, he set up a foundation to support research in the disease.

Mr. Grove will deliver a presentation on Wednesday morning at a symposium in San Francisco, “Translating Technology into Cost-Effective Healthcare.” (His talk will be Webcast live, about 9:10 a.m. to 10 a.m. West Coast time, and 12:10 p.m. to 1 p.m. East Coast time.)

He talked about his new mission during an interview on Tuesday. Mr. Grove is focusing on the shortcomings in the medical innovation pipeline. “Why doesn’t technology give us medical treatments,” he asked, “that are better, faster, cheaper? A system that works, heaven forbid, like the chip world.”

An answer, Mr. Grove says, lies in a concept called “translational medicine.” For years, the National Institutes of Health has been funding research projects into translational medicine, and definitions seem to vary. Mr. Grove, characteristically, offers a crisp one. “It’s the art of taking laboratory, one-off discoveries and putting them into mass production — in higher volume and at lower cost than previous treatments.”

To promote the concept, Mr. Grove is advocating a new master’s degree program in translational medicine. And he’s prodding the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, to begin offering such a joint-degree program.

The degree would combine the talents mainly of the engineering and medical schools, with some business know-how tossed in. Students with engineering backgrounds would take tailored courses in anatomy, physiology and cell biology. Students from the medical school would take courses in project management, the engineering process and clinical trial design. Core courses, taken by all students, would have a business-school flavor, including cost-accounting, organizational behavior, and navigating regulatory and patent laws.

Mr. Grove looks at the challenges surrounding Parkinson’s disease as a field that could benefit one day from the practical, multidisciplinary approach of translational medicine. Modern neurological study, he noted, weighs heavily on the engineering tools of fluid mechanics and materials behavior. There are “substantial similarities” in the underlying engineering with the work of petroleum engineers, for example. “So engineers who are tired of studying seepage of oil in porous rock formations could make the jump to bioengineering,” Mr. Grove said.

Someday, Mr. Grove said, the daunting challenge of drug delivery to specific sections of the brain to prevent the degradation of the brain, and even reverse the decline, will be solved — the key to fighting Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. “That kind of cure will start as a $200,000 procedure, but it should quickly become a $30,000 procedure,” Mr, Grove said, noting that driving that cost curve down is the work of translational medicine.

Mr. Grove has a target size for a joint program involving the two California universities, about 100 students graduating annually from a two-year program. If successful, he is hopeful the model would spread.

Matthew Tirrell, chairman of the bioengineering department at Berkeley, has talked to Mr. Grove about the concept and is enthusiastic. But he said some market research with potential employers would have to be done before going ahead. “What will drive the success of this over the long term will be placement,” Mr. Tirrell said. “Can they get jobs?”

At UCSF, Sarah Nelson, a professor radiology and biomedical imaging, said the idea was “extremely intriguing.” There have been initial discussions with Mr. Grove and university professors. But most of those conversations have been with people from the engineering disciplines. “As the idea progresses,” Ms. Nelson said, “it needs more input from the medical side.”

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