Grove Backs an Engineer’s Approach to Medicine

Andrew S. Grove, the former chief executive of Intel, is taking the next step in his quest to infuse the engineering discipline of Silicon Valley into the development of new medical treatments.

Mr. Grove has pledged $1.5 million so that the University of California campuses in San Francisco and Berkeley can start a joint master’s degree program aimed at so-called translational medicine — the process of turning biological discoveries into drugs and medical devices that can help patients.

The idea is to expose students to both the engineering prowess of Berkeley and the medical research of San Francisco to train a new breed of medical innovator.

“What we have learned from decades of rapid development of information technology is that the key is relentless focus on ‘better, faster, cheaper’ — in everything,’’ Mr. Grove said in a statement. “The best results are achieved through the cooperative efforts of different disciplines, all aimed at the same objective.”

Mr. Grove first broached the idea of the joint-campus program in November.

Mr. Grove’s views reflect in part his personal frustrations with waiting for better treatments for prostate cancer, which he had, and Parkinson’s disease, which he has now.

“I have my own decade-plus experience with a number of diseases that have dozens of ways of curing mice if mice have them and don’t progress toward clinical implementation,’’ Mr. Grove said in an interview.

Translational medicine is indeed a big buzzword these days. Everyone seems to recognize that there is a gap in getting from “bench to bedside.’’ Various programs are being set up to try to speed the process. Interdisciplinary work is another buzzword and trend among medical researchers.

Clearly, medical innovation can stand to be improved. Spending by big pharmaceutical companies on research and development has roughly doubled in the last decade, without any increase in the number of new drugs getting to market.

Yet whether Mr. Grove has the right prescription is open to debate. Some medical researchers have ridiculed his criticisms of their work, saying it is simply not possible to apply the techniques of the electronics business to the far greater complexity of human biology.

“Mr. Grove, you can print out the technical specs for your chips,’’ Derek Lowe, a pharmaceutical industry chemist, wrote in 2007. “We don’t have them for cells.’’