Entire industries are reshaping themselves to serve a rapidly ageing global population. What does this mean for investors?
Longevity is the buzzword of the moment - and it doesn't just refer to how long you'll live. Because longevity is not only about lifespan, but also "healthspan" - the period of time you can expect to live in good health, free of chronic disease and disability.
These concepts are important because we're living so much longer, and will probably continue to do so. The proportion of the global population over 60 years of age is likely to grow from just under 14 % today to 20 % by 2050. This demographic shift is one of the defining forces of our era. It will pose problems - but also offers opportunities.
Many of us think of healthy longevity as a challenge best solved by the biotech industry, with the focus on engineering better healthcare solutions. That's certainly part of the picture. But investors are better served by thinking of longevity as a much broader ecosystem that spans genomics and diagnostics; medical tech and robotics; healthcare services; digital platforms that integrate financing, data and care delivery; as well as what we think of as biotech.
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While biotech has made a significant contribution to improved healthcare, in many ways it has not yet lived up to its potential. Alongside some stellar success stories, like monoclonal antibodies developed from the 1980s, and the mRNA corona vaccine created this decade, the number of successful new biotech drugs has lagged behind other drug classes for years.
Why is this? Perhaps because many diseases have genetic causes, but only a few of these are fully understood. This is somewhat astonishing given that 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the decoding of the human genome. Evidently, knowing the genetic code isn't enough. We also need to understand the regulatory code that determines when genes are "switched on" or "switched off". It's estimated that these sequences make up 8 % to more than 20 % of the human genome.
The biotech industry has had trouble mastering this level of complexity with the tools available so far. But the picture changes dramatically when artificial intelligence (AI) tools are used. Today, DNA analyses that used to take several days can now be fully evaluated within hours thanks to AI. This is, and will continue to be, a game changer for the biotech industry.
Drug design is another area where AI is making inroads. Once a disease-relevant protein has been identified, finding a suitable drug candidate has so far resembled the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. No longer. Using AI to predict the structure and function of possible drug candidates potentially shortens development time by years.
This is only the beginning of the growing role of AI in biomedicine. And AI makes it possible to identify the genes in huge genome datasets that are closely linked to the ageing process. A simple example: we can now estimate the biological age of an organism simply on the basis of gene activity profiles.
The future will show which of the many AI-enabled approaches lead to commercially successful therapies. What is clear is that biotech will be part of the process. Current estimates assume that the share of biotech-produced drugs will rise to almost 60 % of global pharma sales by 2030.
Viewed together these three groups turn longevity from a nice narrative to an interesting and coherent theme covering a broad range of organizations, from resilient healthcare leaders to high-impact innovators at the technological frontier. As ever, however, there are no guarantees, and this remains a risky area, not least because of hard-to-quantify long-term exposures.
