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Original Release Date August 8, 2024: Our Head of Europe Sustainability Research discusses how rising longevity is revolutionizing our fundamental approach from reactive to proactive treatment.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I\u2019m Mike Canfield, Morgan Stanley\u2019s European Head of Sustainability Research. Along with my colleagues, we\u2019re bringing you a variety of perspectives; and today we\u2019re focusing on a topic that affects everyone \u2013 how much does poor health cost us? And how are ageing populations and longer life expectancy driving a fundamental shift in healthcare? 

It\u2019s Thursday, August the 8th, at 4pm in London.   

As populations age across the developed world, health systems need to help people live both longer and healthier. The current system is typically built around to focus on acute conditions and it\u2019s more reactive; so it introduces clinical care or drugs to respond to a condition after it\u2019s already arisen, rather than keeping people healthy in the first instance. So increasingly, with the burden of chronic disease becoming by far the greatest health and economic challenge we face, we need to change the structure of the healthcare system. 

Essentially, the key question is how much is poor health amongst the ageing population really costing society? To get a true sense of that, we need to keep in mind that workers over 50 already earn one out of every three dollars across the G20 regions. By 2035, they're projected to generate nearly 40 per cent of all household income. So with that in mind, preventable conditions amongst those people aged 50-64 at the moment, are already costing G20 economies over $1 trillion annually in productivity loss. And there\u2019s one more key number: 19 per cent. That's how much age-diverse workforces can raise GDP per capita over the next thirty years, according to estimates from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD. So clearly, keeping workers healthier for longer underpins a more productive, more efficient, and a profitable global economy. So it\u2019s clear that [if] the current healthcare system were to shift from sick from care to prevention, the global gains would be substantial.

The BioPharma sector is already contributing some targeted novel treatments in areas like smart chemotherapy and in CRISPR \u2013 which is a technology that allows for selective DNA modification. While we can credit BioPharma and MedTech for really powerful innovations in diagnostics, in AI deployment for areas like data science and material science, and in sophisticated telemedicine \u2013 all these breakthroughs together give a more personalized, targeted health system; which is a big step in the right direction, but honestly they alone can\u2019t solve this much broader longevity challenge we face. 

Focus on health and prevention, ultimately, could address those underlying causes of ill-health, so that problems don\u2019t arise even in the first instance. Governments around the world are obviously realizing the value of preventive care over sick care. And as a strategy, disease prevention fundamentally aims to promote wellness across the board, whether that\u2019s in things like mental state, nutrition or even in things like sleep and stress. While it might be easy to kind of conflate that with wellness trends \u2013 things like green smoothies or meditation \u2013 the underlying benefits of boosting health at the cellular level have much broader and deeper implications. Things like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, supporting better health across populations can significantly reduce the incidence of a wide range of chronic conditions. It can lower the burden on health systems overall, and actually increase healthy lifespan at the end of the day. 

BioPharma advances are significant, but addressing longevity will require a much broader alignment across a myriad of elements; everything really from the food system to sanitation to training healthcare professionals. And of course, all of that will require consistent policy support. Regulators and policymakers are paying very close attention to their ageing population \u2013 and so are we. We\u2019ll continue to bring you updates on this topic, which is so important to all of us.

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