The Worldwide Healthcare Trust has highlighted Eli Lilly, Bayer and CareDx as healthcare stocks it holds, describing a bottom-up approach focused on innovation and growth.
The trust said Eli Lilly's tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound, offers best-in-class weight loss and blood-sugar control. It said other potential health benefits could drive future growth, including in cardiovascular, kidney and liver disease, sleep apnea and arthritic pain, and perhaps cognitive benefits, mood disorders, addiction, cancer and inflammatory disorders.
Bayer may be best known for aspirin, but the trust said long-running legal issues over its Roundup product may be obscuring a transformation in its underlying businesses. It said demand for newer prostate cancer and kidney disease products continues to grow strongly, and that asundexian has been shown to reduce the risk of recurrent stroke by 26% in at-risk patients and is now under regulatory review. The trust added that the Roundup saga may be approaching a resolution and a proposed settlement could remove much of the uncertainty weighing on the shares.
CareDx is evolving from a transplant-focused diagnostics company into a broader precision-medicine platform, the trust said. Its AlloSure franchise leads in donor-derived, cell-free DNA testing for organ-transplant surveillance, and second-quarter revenues rose by more than 50% with earnings up by over 500%. The trust said the acquisition of Naveris brings NavDx, a blood-based test for viral-mediated cancers, which management estimates represents a $5 billion addressable market.