How Brain Health Is Shaping the Future of Healthcare Investment

The latest trends in personal development and optimizing performance revolve around brain health. Distinct from mental health, which deals with disease or brain conditions, brain health focuses on productivity, connectivity, clarity, resilience, and emotional balance. 

UT Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth has been investigating and investing in the space for decades, building mountains of evidence to show significant gains in brain performance through exercises, habits, and behaviors to enhance everyone’s brain health, from adolescents to CEOs. 

Dallas-based architecture firm HKS has been working with the Center for BrainHealth from the beginning. Employees are tested and trained to improve cognitive function, with impressive results. And there’s a ripple effect: when the company works with clients, it helps them design space with brain health in mind. “As architects, the only thing we have are our brains,” says Dan Noble, chairman and CEO at HKS. “How do we get the most out of that? What do we do to help employees get the most out of their most precious resource?”

The opportunities for making brain health profitable are enormous, says Sandra Bond Chapman, chief director of the Center for BrainHealth. “Better brain health benefits every single person,” she says. “As the evidence mounts, it will soon become the norm for organizations to invest in this form of talent building for advancement at every leadership level, as well as improving brain health and performance across the entire workforce.”

When business leaders turn their collective eyes toward a product, service, or movement, investors follow. And that’s what’s happening in the brain health space. Services and technology that improve brain health are attractive investment opportunities for several reasons. 

First is the ubiquity of opportunity—nearly everyone can benefit from expanding brain peak years, regardless of age or occupation. Additionally, technology is sure to play an essential role in measuring and improving brain health, and the companies that can capitalize in that space have much to gain. 

The Center for BrainHealth developed the BrainHealth index, which gives a composite score to a person’s brain health, created by an algorithm built from 20 established assessments. Its Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactic is built on 30 years of research with patients at all levels of organizations. The center has worked with more than 90,000 people over the years and offers brain health programs to address needs as diverse as those suffering from Alzheimer’s to college students and military veterans, as well. It has been shown to improve cognitive performance, well-being, and ability to engage socially. Neural imaging of the brain has shown increased brain blood flow and network synchronicity, which is the ability of the brain to simultaneously organize collective action.

These tools and others in development are examples of the types of technology attracting interest from business leaders and investors. “The conversations happening now about investing in brain health and performance were simply not happening 10 or even five years ago,” says Andrew Nevin, inaugural director of Brainomics Venture, which examines the economic impact of improved mental performance. “The now-demonstrated reality of neuroplasticity—your brain’s life-long ability to change depending on how you use it and care for it—has ignited interest across the investment community.”

Tolleson Wealth Management Chief Investment Officer Eric Bennett is chair of the Center for BrainHealth’s capital campaign and has experience with the investment flowing toward the space from a wealth management and organizational perspective. As a money manager for family offices, Tolleson continued to see growth in families aiming their investment toward innovation and biotech. Although still early in the cycle, he says the last two years have brought a massive development in the science behind brain health, which has attracted more capital into the space. 

The medical device industry will likely be where brain health investing gets its big break as medical entrepreneurs look to do everything from improving performance to fighting Alzheimer’s disease. “It has created hope for the investment ecosystem about the brain and caused investment funds to look at the brain,” Bennett says. “Three years ago, I was aware of just one venture fund that focused on the brain. Now I am aware of 20 pure venture capital funds that do so.”

For a nonprofit like the Center for BrainHealth, which focuses on research and fueling the science behind cognitive improvement, increased investment into brain health and biotech means greater opportunity to partner with companies to turn the research into larger-scale impact and profits. If companies like HKS are utilizing brain science to improve performance, there is a business opportunity waiting to be seized by a savvy entrepreneur. “As public comprehension of brain health and performance increases, combined with the power of AI and machine learning, we expect to see exponentially higher interest in our mission from public and private funding sources,” says Stephen White, the center’s chief operating officer. “We remain committed to new discovery and quickly translating it into practical tools that people can leverage to create broad impact.”