CNBC is launching a new conference called Healthy Returns: Investing in Health Care Innovation. This event will take place on March 28, 2018, in New York City in an effort that includes an advisory board to help guide its editorial efforts. The event will be coupled with TV and digital content before, during and after the conference.
Why Healthy Returns? Health care spending in the United States accounts for about 18 percent of our GDP, reaching $3.2 trillion in 2015, or $9,990 for every man, woman and child. There has certainly been no shortage of news coverage about the debate in Washington over the ACA/Obamacare, but Healthy Returns is not solely focused on policy or politics. Rather, this will focus on the business of health care, includinig innovations and investment opportunities.
Biotech, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and those who invest in them, face unique challenges. From an uncertain regulatory environment to the exigencies of clinical trials, this is an industry rife with risk. But along with that risk, of course, is the possibility for big rewards, both clinically and financially. This is an extraordinary moment as precision medicine, gene editing and new approaches to immunotherapy, coupled with ever-increasing computing power, begin to lead to therapies that just a few years ago seemed totally out of reach.
Silicon Valley is now getting into the act, too, as Google, Apple and Amazon circle. Big tech and well-funded start-ups are seeking to revolutionize everything from how we monitor and measure our health (wearables) to how we deliver treatment (surgical robots and “smart” pills). What’s clear is that health care is going through a period of rapid and significant medical and technological transformation.
The Healthy Returns advisory board will help guide efforts in covering this transformation. Among those on the board: entrepreneurs such as Anne Wojcicki, founder and CEO of 23andMe, the hot genetic testing and analysis service; philanthropists such as Sean Parker, founder of Napster and founding president of Facebook who is now chairman of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, and Gates Foundation CEO Susan Desmond-Hellmann; leading medical technologists such as Dr. Eric Topol, one of the country’s leading voices on the use of genomics to drive transformative research; and top investors and executives such as Fred Hassan, special limited partner at Warburg Pincus and former CEO of Schering-Plough.