Scenario 2

Organ replacement and annuity insurance

However, the genetic technology revolution will also reach people in whom chronic diseases have already developed. In particular, patients with severely diseased vital organs (e.g. with heart failure or kidney failure) will be less limited to conventional organ transplants in the future, especially since the chronic shortage of donor organs cannot be permanently overcome and, as before, there may always be the problem of the body rejecting donated organs.

In this respect, experts see valuable potential in embryonic stem cells (cells of early human life that retain the ability to develop into all tissue types), which ideally could be used to customise a new heart or replacement kidney for a patient and be transplanted without the usual rejection reactions. Thanks to this technique, it even seems possible to reconnect severed nerves and thus, for example, to heal a paralysed patient.

Another possibility for overcoming the shortage of donor organs is xeno-transplantation. In this innovation, specially bred pigs provide a source of replacement organs modified by genetic technology and thus adapted to the human body. The feared rejection reactions can be avoided through this genetic technology approach.

Both these therapeutic approaches could make critical contributions to a marked increase in the life expectancy of even chronically ill people. Statistically, our average lifespan would therefore continue to increase.

What does this mean to the insurer? Providers of pensions and annuities will, for example have to take this development into account by creating additional reserves or by introducing new calculation principles.

As happened in previous decades where the introduction of antibiotics and intensive care units helped to increase our average life expectancy, so replacement organs, preventive medicine and nutraceuticals (genetically engineered foods that simultaneously act as vaccines and/or medicines) could extend the human lifespan further. A specific example: a 50% reduction in deaths from heart attacks alone could increase the average life expectancy of women by 0.8 years. The implications for insurers are obvious.