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.
----- Transcript -----
Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I’m Mike Canfield, Morgan
Stanley’s European Head of Sustainability Research. Along with my
colleagues, we’re bringing you a variety of perspectives; and
today we’re focusing on a topic that affects everyone – how much
does poor health cost us? And how are ageing populations and
longer life expectancy driving a fundamental shift in
healthcare?
It’s 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’s more reactive; so it introduces clinical care or drugs to
respond to a condition after it’s 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’s 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’s 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 – 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 –
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’t 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’t 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’s 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 – things like green smoothies or meditation – 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 – and so are we.
We’ll continue to bring you updates on this topic, which is so
important to all of us.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please do leave us a
review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with
a friend or colleague today.
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