A Research Revolution

During the time Andrew S. Grove spent at Intel, the computer chip company he co-founded, the number of transistors on a chip went from about 1,000 to almost 10 billion. Over that same period, the standard treatment for Parkinson's disease went from L-dopa to . . . L-dopa.

Grove (who beat prostate cancer 12 years ago and now suffers from Parkinson's) thinks there is something deeply wrong with this picture, and he is letting the pharmaceutical industry, the National Institutes of Health and academic biomedicine have it. Like an increasing number of critics who are fed up with biomedical research that lets paralyzed rats (but not people) walk again, that cures mouse (but not human) cancer and that lifts the fog of the rodent version of Alzheimer's but not people's, he is taking aim at what more and more critics see as a broken system.

On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience , he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Sharon Begley just before he left for the neuroscience meeting. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What spurred your interest in and concern about the slow pace of drug discovery?
Twelve years ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which has a great advocacy community, and I became an advocate for putting more money and time into research on it. But I got disappointed with the lack of real output. Not much has changed 12 years later. The other thing that bothered me as I learned more about biomedical research is that I didn't see important aspects of R&D emphasized, such as progression biomarkers [chemicals, such as those in the blood, that indicate whether a drug is working]. Then I was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and found out that a major development taking place in this field was FDA licensing for deep-brain stimulation [to treat Parkinson's], which is a big step. But when I looked around there were no other big steps or even medium steps; the same drug that was the mainstay of Parkinson's treatment in the 1960s, L-dopa, is still the mainstay today. I became convinced that something was wrong here.

In what way does the semiconductor industry offer lessons to pharma?
I picked the semiconductor industry because it's the one I know; I spent 40 years in it, during which it became the foundation for all of electronics. It has done a bunch of unbelievable things, powering computers of increasing power and speed. But in the treatment of Parkinson's, we have gone from levodopa to levodopa. ALS [Lou Gehrig's disease] has no good treatment; Alzheimer's has none.

Why is the speed of progress so different in semiconductor research and drug development?
The fundamental tenet that drives us all in the semiconductor industry is a deeply felt conviction that what matters is time to market, or time to money. But you never hear an executive from a pharmaceutical company say, "Before the end of the year I'm going to have xyz drug," the way Steve Jobs said the iPhone would be out on schedule. The heart of every high-tech executive has been, get the product into customers' hands and ramp up production. That drive is just not present in pharma; the drive to get sufficient understanding and go for it is missing.