Rethinking the future of healthcare

Healthcare innovation across data, medicines, devices and delivery methods could produce exceptional long-term investment opportunities as companies address difficult medical problems with new technologies.

• Tempus AI organises clinical and molecular data, claims connections with more than half of US oncologists and over 65 percent of US academic medical centres, and aims to improve cancer treatment decisions.
• Moderna is developing messenger RNA as a programmable medicine, with its personalised melanoma therapy developed with Merck becoming the first mRNA-based cancer treatment to succeed in Phase 3 trials.
• Insulet’s Omnipod systems aim to improve diabetes management through easier insulin delivery, while Zipline serves thousands of health facilities and delivers prescriptions to US homes after building its healthcare logistics network in Africa.
• Denali Therapeutics focuses on neurodegenerative disease, and its Avlayah is described as the first FDA-approved biologic specifically designed to cross the blood-brain barrier.
• Recursion Pharmaceuticals uses AI and large-scale cell imaging for drug discovery, while Enveda Biosciences searches naturally occurring compounds with an AI-enabled platform; both target the high failure rates and long timelines of conventional development.

Takeaway: Baillie Gifford sees healthcare as a sustained reinvention rather than a single-technology theme, while acknowledging that clinical delays, regulatory hurdles and company failures make outcomes uncertain, including Moderna’s need to prove that recent progress can support a durable development platform.