from Wired News

Taking Stock of Life Extension

Chronic disease can make for healthy investments: Investors who don’t operate on a multi-decade time frame would be wiser to focus on technologies that extend the life spans of unhealthy people.

The longer we live, the more time we have to fall victim to cancer, diabetes, senility and a host of chronic diseases too lengthy to catalog. Increasingly, diseases that were once fatal are now treatable, chronic conditions.

“As a business, chronic disease is ideal, because you have a repeat customer, unfortunately,” said John McCamant, editor of the Medical Technology Stock Letter, who believes more diseases will go the way of HIV. Not long ago HIV-positive people faced a near-certain death sentence; today the disease is largely treatable as a chronic condition using a combination of drugs.