Brain Capital: Creating a New Investment Category

Date & Time: TBD

Location: The Icon in Davos-Klosters, Promenade 89

This panel explores cognitive and emotional skills, and the brain health that underlies them, as an economic asset class on par with physical or financial capital. Speakers will consider the parallels with sustainable finance and identify the financial players, tools and metrics needed to make brain capital investible. Possible launch of Brain Capital Index with Irrational Capital.

Moderator:

Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times, CNBC

Speakers:

Chris Boerner, CEO, Bristol Myers Squibb

Shyam Bishen, Head of Health and Healthcare, World Economic Forum

Sonja Gibbs, Managing Director and Head of Sustainable Finance, Institute of International Finance (IIF)

Álvaro Santos Pereira, Chief Economist, OECD

Investing in Women’s Brain Health

Date & Time: TBD

Location: The Icon in Davos-Klosters, Promenade 89

Two-thirds of Alzheimer's patients are women and women are also twice as likely to become caregivers to loved ones, often leaving the workforce to do so. This is an economic productivity challenge as much as it is a healthcare one, yet few vehicles exist to invest in solutions. This panel lays the groundwork for a new investment class.

Keynote:
Bill Gates, Gates Ventures

Moderator:

Simone Foxman, Bloomberg

Speakers:

Maria Shriver, Founder, Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement at Cleveland Clinic

Lisa Mosconi, Director, Women’s Brain Health Initiative, Well Cornell Medicine

Chelsea Toler, Co-Founder, Logictry

Brain Health and the Global South — A New Approach to Development

Date & Time: TBD

Location: The Icon in Davos-Klosters, Promenade 89

Dementia and brain disease burden is rising fastest in low- and middle-income countries. This panel approaches brain health as foundational to development planning alongside education and workforce policy, not as an afterthought and seeks consensus around a post-2030 development agenda.

Moderator:
Raj Kumar, EIC, Devex

Speakers:
Dr. David Kershenovich, Secretary of Health, Mexico

George Vradenburg, Founding Chairman, Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative

Alexander De Croo, Chief, United Nationals Development Programme (UNDP)

AI, the Brain and the Future of Human Advantage

Date & Time: TBD

Location: The Icon in Davos-Klosters, Promenade 89

As AI takes on more of the cognitive work people used to do, the question of what humans are uniquely good at gets sharper and more economically important. Judgment, creativity, empathy, adaptability and the ability to learn new things quickly all depend on healthy brains, and they may be the skills that hold their value as automation spreads. That makes brain health the human advantage in the age of AI, and an employer issue as much as a health one: companies that want to get the most out of AI will need people who can think critically, adapt quickly and stay well under pressure. This panel looks at both sides of that relationship: how AI could speed up brain research, enable earlier diagnosis and personalize care, and how growing reliance on AI tools might affect attention, memory and mental health. Speakers will consider what employers in particular, alongside governments and educators, should do now to protect and build the human capabilities that will matter most in an AI economy.

Moderator:

Harris Eyre, Global Brain Economy Initiative

Speakers:
Daniela Amodei, Co-Founder and President, Anthropic

Sergey Brin, Former President of Alphabet

Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO of Thrive Global

Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF

Prevention: Can We Change the Trajectory of Brain Disease

Date & Time: TBD

Location: The Icon in Davos-Klosters, Promenade 89

For decades, dementia was treated as an inevitable part of getting old. The 2024 Lancet Commission estimated that around 45% of dementia cases could, in theory, be prevented or delayed by addressing 14 modifiable risk factors across the life course, including high blood pressure, hearing loss, physical inactivity, social isolation and air pollution. Detection is moving just as fast. Simple blood tests can now pick up the biology of Alzheimer’s well before symptoms appear, and new neurotechnologies, from digital cognitive assessments to wearable brain monitoring, could one day let us track brain health the way we track blood pressure. The harder question is who benefits. More than 60% of people living with dementia live in low- and middle-income countries, where specialist care is scarce and health budgets are already stretched. This panel brings together industry, science, public health and global advocacy to ask what it would take to move from evidence to action at scale: how to bring early detection and risk reduction into primary care and communities, not just specialist clinics; who pays for prevention when the savings arrive years later; whether countries still building their health systems can design prevention in from the start; and what a realistic plan to bend the curve on brain disease within a generation would look like.

Moderator:

Peter Vanham, Editor in Chief, The Cercle

Speakers:
George Vradenburg, Founding Chairman, Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative

Jean Kaseya, Africa CDC

Tracy Laabs, Wyss Center

Severin Schwan, Board Chair, Roche

TBD - WHO or PAHO