Investment strategist and former private wealth executive Maryann Selfe argues that women’s health is emerging as both a gateway to the precision-health economy and a significant new healthcare investment theme. In an interview with WealthSummit, she explains where the most promising opportunities are taking shape, why institutional access remains difficult, and why Europe, with Switzerland at its centre, could become a global hub for financing the next generation of healthcare.
Maryann Selfe, investment strategist and former private wealth executive (Image: billiondollarblindspot.com)
Nigerian-born and Anglo-Swiss Maryann Selfe is the author of «The Billion Dollar Blindspot», founder of the FemmeHealth Alliance and the driving force behind Calabar Capital, an investment platform being developed to give institutional capital access to women’s health and the broader precision-health opportunity.
For more than two decades, she has worked across London, Zurich and New York, observing how fragmented opportunities gradually develop into recognised investment categories.
Maryann Selfe, let’s start bluntly: is women’s health genuinely an investment category –or is finance simply relabelling an old social problem?
For years, women’s health was discussed almost entirely in moral or medical terms. Those conversations were necessary, but they obscured the economic reality. Decades of under-research and underinvestment created enormous unmet demand. In capital-markets language, that means structural inefficiency. But structural inefficiency alone does not create an investment category.
In healthcare, investment categories emerge when scientific progress reaches the point where it can be translated into commercially viable businesses, supported by clinical evidence, scalable business models and institutional capital. That is what is beginning to happen in women’s health.
Women’s health is therefore not finance relabelling a social problem. It is one of the clearest examples of healthcare’s broader transition towards more precise, preventive, and biologically informed care.
Investors are paid to find blind spots. Why did they miss this one?
Because capital can only allocate based on the evidence available to it, and for decades that evidence was incomplete.
Why?
Medical research, clinical trials, and treatment pathways were largely developed around a male model of health. Once that model became embedded, the data, diagnostics, products, and ultimately the investment opportunities that emerged all reflected it. Investors were therefore evaluating a market whose scientific foundations were themselves incomplete.
As more evidence emerges, entirely new commercial opportunities are becoming visible. Investors should not confuse «historically neglected» with «commercially irrelevant». In many cases, the neglect is precisely what creates the opportunity.
The term «women’s health» still sounds narrow. Is the label part of the problem?
Yes. Many people hear «women’s health» and think only of fertility, pregnancy, or menopause. Those are important markets, but they are only the most visible expressions of a much broader transformation.
For decades, healthcare largely relied on population averages and a one-size-fits-all approach to medicine. Women’s health has exposed the limitations of that model more clearly than almost any other field because biological sex influences how diseases develop, how symptoms present, how treatments work, and how health changes across the life course.
As healthcare increasingly accounts for those differences, the opportunity extends far beyond women’s health itself. It reaches into diagnostics, therapeutics, biotechnology, medical devices, artificial intelligence, digital health, and entirely new models of care.
That is why I see women’s health as one of the clearest entry points into precision health. It demonstrates that the future of healthcare will be built around biological precision rather than population averages.
That is intellectually persuasive. Where is the hard commercial case?
The commercial case begins with unmet need, but it cannot end there. Investors are not paid simply to identify problems; they are paid to identify businesses capable of solving them sustainably and at scale.
That means looking beyond the size of the patient population and evaluating the quality of the science, the strength of the clinical evidence, the regulatory and reimbursement pathway, the economics of the business model, and whether the solution addresses a genuine unmet clinical need.
The strongest opportunities arise where scientific innovation solves an important healthcare problem in ways that improve outcomes and make healthcare systems more efficient. Those opportunities increasingly span diagnostics, therapeutics, medical technologies, and new models of care.
Women’s health should be judged with exactly the same investment discipline as every other area of healthcare. It does not deserve lower standards because the social case is compelling.
What changed personally for you? Why make this your defining issue?
A personal experience with the healthcare system prompted me to look more closely. I initially assumed I was examining an overlooked part of medicine. What I found instead was the early formation of an emerging investment category.
Over more than two decades in private wealth and institutional investing, I had watched markets evolve in similar ways. In the early stages, opportunities are fragmented, data is limited, expertise is scattered, and most investors consider the sector premature. Then the science improves, products reach the market, specialist managers emerge, and capital begins to organize around the opportunity.
I recognized that pattern in women’s health. What began as a personal question became an investment question. Once I viewed it through the lens of capital formation rather than healthcare alone, it became clear that this was not simply an overlooked part of medicine, but one of the earliest expressions of a much broader transformation in healthcare.
Many investors will say: interesting, but too early, too risky, and too difficult to access. Are they wrong?
They may be right about the difficulty, but I think the conclusion is more nuanced. Emerging categories are difficult by definition. That does not mean they should be ignored. It means investors need a disciplined way to evaluate and access them.
The market remains fragmented, and many of the most capable specialist managers remain below the radar of larger institutions. The challenge is not simply finding them but developing sufficient conviction to invest with them while managing risk appropriately.
That requires more than access. It requires rigorous manager selection, diversification, governance, and ongoing oversight. The objective is not to eliminate risk – that is impossible in any emerging market – but to build an institutional framework that allows investors to participate intelligently.
Is that the objective behind Calabar Capital?
Yes. Calabar Capital is being built to provide institutional-quality access to opportunities in women’s health and the broader precision-health sector.
The objective is to identify specialist healthcare managers with deep domain expertise and bring them together within a disciplined investment platform. Rather than asking a family office or institutions to navigate an increasingly fragmented landscape alone, the platform is intended to offer a diversified and governed route into the category.
Access by itself is not enough. Investors need rigorous manager selection, portfolio construction, governance, and ongoing oversight. Without those elements, «access» is simply exposure.
Why rely on specialist managers rather than investing directly?
Because healthcare rewards specialist expertise, but institutional investing also requires diversification. Direct healthcare investing demands a deep understanding of science, regulation, reimbursement, clinical adoption, and capital formation. Specialist managers spend years developing expertise, networks, and judgement within specific areas of healthcare that are difficult for generalist investors to replicate.
That specialisation is precisely what makes them valuable. But precision health is not a single market. It is an ecosystem spanning multiple clinical disciplines, technologies, stages, and geographies. No specialist manager is trying to cover that entire landscape, nor should they.
Our view is that the strongest institutional approach is to combine multiple specialist perspectives within a single portfolio. That allows investors to benefit from deep domain expertise while achieving broader exposure across the precision-health ecosystem and reducing dependence on any single investment style, geography or clinical focus.
You argue that Europe could lead. That is ambitious given its record of commercialising innovation.
Europe has the science. The question is whether it can organize the capital. The continent has outstanding universities, research institutions, and life-sciences companies. But scientific leadership does not automatically become investment leadership.
Europe has often created valuable intellectual property and then watched the companies or economic upside migrate elsewhere. The next step is to connect science, entrepreneurship, and long-term capital far more deliberately.
And Switzerland? Is this more than a convenient headquarters story?
Switzerland has an unusually strong combination of life sciences, private wealth, institutional capital, research excellence, and global connectivity.
But those ingredients are not connected as effectively as they could be. Switzerland could become a global hub for precision-health investment if it can build stronger links between scientific innovation, specialist investment expertise and long-term capital.
The opportunity is not merely to fund innovation, but to finance companies through growth, retain intellectual property, and create an investable healthcare cluster. For a country that already leads in both wealth management and life sciences, bringing those two strengths together feels like a natural next chapter.
What would tell you that women’s health had entered the investment mainstream?
I think the language would change first. Investors would stop asking whether women’s health is a legitimate investment category and start asking how it fits within their broader healthcare allocation. The conversation would shift from whether to invest to how to build exposure.
There would be better data, clearer classifications, and more sophisticated portfolio construction. Investors would compare managers, strategies, stages, and risk profiles in the same way we do across other parts of healthcare.
But the biggest change would be conceptual. Women’s health would no longer be treated as a niche, a diversity initiative, or a specialist venture theme. It would be recognized as one of the clearest expressions of healthcare’s transition towards biological precision and therefore an integral part of how investors think about the future of healthcare.
Maryann Selfe (Image: Karl Selfe)
For more than two decades, Maryann Selfe worked at the heart of global capital markets. At Credit Suisse (later UBS), she advised ultra-high-net-worth families, built portfolios, and guided investors through periods of uncertainty. In that capacity, she oversaw more than $5 billion in client assets and $700 million in advisory mandates.
Over time, however, one pattern became impossible to ignore: vast areas of healthcare affecting half the population remained largely invisible to investors because the system was not designed to recognise them. In response, she began writing, speaking, and convening around the structural forces reshaping healthcare innovation. In spring 2026, she published her widely acclaimed book, «The Billion Dollar Blind Spot».
