Worldwide Healthcare Trust (WWH) is managed by Sven Borho and Trevor Polischuk at global healthcare investment specialist OrbiMed. The trust aims to generate a high level of capital growth from a diversified portfolio of global healthcare stocks. It recently celebrated its 30-year anniversary, during which time, it generated a NAV total return of more than 4,200%, and a share price total return of more than 3,500%. Performance is measured against the MSCI World Health Care Index (sterling adjusted), which achieved a total return of more than 2,300% in the 30-year period.

1. Trust managers can draw on the extensive resources at OrbiMed

OrbiMed is a leading global healthcare investment company with a proven track record across public and private equity and debt markets. It has around $20bn of assets under management and 12 offices worldwide, including in New York, San Francisco, London, Herzliya (in Israel), Hong Kong, Shanghai and Mumbai. The company’s team of around 150 professionals invests in every subsector of the healthcare sector, across all geographies and at all stages of a company’s lifecycle.

2. The managers select stocks on a bottom-up basis

OrbiMed has employed a public equity portfolio review process since 2009, whereby Borho, Polischuk and colleagues in the public equities team meet regularly to discuss WWH’s portfolio structure and individual holdings. Topics include clinical and regulatory events and new drug launches. Stocks are selected from a universe of around 1,000 companies and the portfolio is diversified by geography, subsector and market capitalisation. The managers seek companies with underappreciated product pipelines and strong management teams, which are trading on reasonable valuations. They also have good access to unquoted companies, given OrbiMed’s large private equity team. There is a disciplined portfolio construction approach and a rigorous risk-management process.

3. WWH’s portfolio is biased towards growth stocks

Although the trust experienced a difficult period of performance in recent years as growth stocks struggled in a rising interest rate environment, WWH has a long-term record of significant outperformance versus its benchmark, and recent performance has been more encouraging.

The main features of the trust’s portfolio are its longstanding overweight exposure to biotech and an underweight allocation to pharma stocks. Within biotech, the managers favour emerging (smaller-cap) companies rather than larger businesses, as, although these companies are inherently riskier, their risk/reward profiles are deemed to be superior. Over the long term, this strategy has been significantly beneficial for the trust’s performance.

Innovation within the biopharma industry is strong, driven by novel therapeutic technologies and supported by the rise of AI, which the managers believe will touch almost every aspect of the sector. Two-thirds of the industry pipeline and more than 50% of new product approvals in the last decade have been sourced from biotech companies. Also, the regulatory environment remains supportive, with a record number of novel drug approvals in recent years.

WWH has benefited from robust healthcare M&A activity as several portfolio companies have been acquired at meaningful premiums, both direct holdings and those in a proprietary M&A basket. Activity should continue as pharma companies look to replenish their pipelines ahead of a major upcoming patent cliff.

4. The healthcare sector has historically provided relatively robust annual total returns

There is a wealth of opportunities in the global healthcare sector across a range of subsectors: pharmaceuticals (including speciality and generic businesses), biotechnology, medtech/devices, healthcare services and life science tools. The US is the most developed healthcare market and makes up more than 70% of the MSCI World Health Care Index. US healthcare stocks have delivered volatile and uncharacteristically poor relative performances across the past few years in a narrow market dominated by large-cap technology stocks, which may offer a compelling entry point to the sector.

Published 30 March 2026