Small mention in The Age. found by kenny powers and posted on...

Small mention in The Age. found by kenny powers and posted on Neu thread.

LIVING LONGER

By 2050, almost a quarter of Australia's population will be aged over 65, compared with 14 per cent now, a trend that is playing out across the developed world. This has profound implications not just for policymakers but for investors, as older people spend more on health and aged-care services.

A portfolio manager at SG Hiscock, Rob Tucker, says greater demand for aged-care services is already putting pressure on fragile government budgets. He says governments will increasingly look to the private sector to fill the gap.

''The ageing-population theme will be with us for a long time. The older people get, the more they spend on healthcare, hospitals and pharmaceuticals. For certain sectors such as healthcare, this will create organic growth,'' Tucker says.

The chief investment officer of Australian Ethical, David Macri, says there is no pure investment exposure in the aged-care sector. So he takes a step back and targets property developers active in the sector, such as Lend Lease and Stockland.

The healthcare sector is easier to access. In the year to June 2012, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology were among the few positive sectors of the local market. Tucker's preferred exposure to the sector is currently Ramsay Health Care.

Macri says the growing disease burden and the cost to governments is a theme with strong investment characteristics. Cochlear and CSL are already global success stories, but Macri says small biotech stocks offer the potential to revolutionise medical treatment on a global scale.

Australian Ethical recently bought shares in three biotechs with promising new drugs and technology - AVITA MEDICAL, Alchemia and Neuren Pharmaceuticals. The sector offers opportunities for patient investors with a high-risk tolerance.

Barbour identifies a variation on this theme, which he calls personalised medicine. He says the unravelling of the genome has raised expectations of significant breakthroughs in cures for cancer and other diseases. At the same time, the cost of DNA sequencing per person is falling dramatically.

''We expect medicine to move from a 'diagnose-and-treat' model to 'analyse-and-predict','' he says. ''We think this could be bigger than the internet over the next decade.''

Drawing an analogy with the 19th-century gold rush, in which people who sold picks and shovels to the miners often made more money, he prefers investments in companies that make and sell machines that aid diagnosis.

Barbour says large pharmaceutical companies are already taking over companies that sell diagnostic equipment, pathology labs and breast-screening companies.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/money/investing/finger-on-the-future-20120911-25owj.html#ixzz26IplZoyy