Investment Themes 2025: Healthcare Innovation
We continue to favour the Healthcare Innovation investment theme in 2025.
As US president Donald Trump continues to unveil a slew of new policies, long-term structural themes remain consistent among the chaos. Within the Healthcare Innovation theme, weight loss initiatives, generative AI usage, and personalised medicine remain the key drivers of growth.
GLP-1 Adoption
Adolescent obesity has quadrupled since 1990 while adult obesity has reportedly doubled.
The World Health Organisation estimates that over 400 million people worldwide are living with Type 2 diabetes which is linked to more than 1 million deaths per year.
Unless you are a Hollywood movie star, these issues remain the main reasons for people starting to take weight loss drugs (GLP-1). However, GLP-1s treatments are now being explored for use in treating Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic conditions, while also showing strong evidence of having cardiovascular benefits.
The graph below demonstrates the projected growth of annual GLP-1 sales based on the current largest players within this market. Increasing supply, wider usage and a growing number of new entrants and innovators are expected to drive growth going forward.
Generative AI in Healthcare
Healthcare organisations are being pushed to rethink the way they operate due to ongoing staff shortages and growing patient demand.
Generative AI has emerged as a powerful tool which is supportive of this mission and is expected to boost clinical productivity and healthcare leaders are already investing in or planning to invest in Gen-AI within the next 3 years.
Gen-AI tech is already being used to function as virtual assistants to complete tasks as writing up specialist consultation notes but increasingly, drug manufacturers are using gen-AI and machine-learning to create predictive models for drug discovery and predicting treatment outcomes.
Today, people have a greater level of understanding and are more informed about their personal health. This has led to a shift towards preventative healthcare and wellness. Gen-AI is helping to enable this shift by incorporating data based on genetic information (otherwise known as genomics) together with behavioural health information to deliver hyper-personalised medicines and treatments.
Healthcare Innovation remains one of the key long-term structural themes we are focused on for 2025 and into the future. This theme is blended with other structural themes to provide the portfolios with long-term growth prospects while adhering to prudent industry diversification and risk management.
What we’re reading: 7 Healthcare Trends That Will Transform Medicine In 2025
