Ageing and the growth opportunity for Australia
Yet while the collision between ageing and healthcare promises enormous opportunity, the question is how we’re going to pay for our ageing population.
GE Healthcare Life Sciences managing director Dr Brian Hood suggests there will be a real issue with taxation and future healthcare funding for starters as our working-age population will be outnumbered by retirees and those close to retirement.
Beyond the taxation issues, Hood says most people close to the age of 60 now will suffer from many chronic diseases. “The most prevalent of these are cardiovascular diseases and mental issues which will probably soak up close to two-thirds of the health budget for those over 60.
“You also have to take into account that just over half of people over 60 report some form of disability and this grows exponentially as the population gets older.
“In fact, by the age of 85 around 84 per cent of people report severe core limitation,” Hood tells The Australian Financial Review.
Hood says the challenge for the healthcare sector is to control the level of disability and chronic disease and prolong its onset to later in life.
Advances in Personalised Medicine
The good news is in recent years there have been massive strides in personalised medicine and preventative healthcare and we are beginning to discover ways of keeping chronic disease at bay for longer.
Hood is bullish about the future and cites Moore’s Law, which states that computing processing power doubles every two years. “In the world of personalised medicine, Moore’s Law has been smashed and thrown out the window.”
For Hood, the beauty of these tremendous strides forward is we are now able to map the human genome relatively cost effectively and people can see if they have a predisposition for a range of chronic diseases and then can make the necessary lifestyle changes.
“And considering the pace of technology, personalised medicine has the potential to save billions of dollars out of the healthcare system,” Hood says.
And as the technology continues to improve and researchers have better data on the genetics of a disease, they have a better understanding of how to develop drugs more quickly and cheaply.
“With better analytical tools available we can now develop less blockbuster drugs and develop more personalised drugs instead.”
Moving beyond drug development, Hood is especially excited by the current research into regenerative medicine.
“It’s moving away from small molecule medicine and using the body’s own immune system.
“It’s developing tools to grow stem cells outside of the body and being able to reinsert them back into the body. For example, if someone has heart problems and there are a lot of dead cells around the heart, we will be able to re-infuse stem cells into the body where they can start to grow, divide and create new tissue around the heart.
“This has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of dollars around individual heart health,” Hood concludes.
This was reposted from the Australian Financial Review.