Cathie Wood says she founded her investment firm for a moment like this one. Wood is the founder, CEO and chief investment officer of ARK Invest, which invests in what it calls disruptive innovation. Speaking at Moonshots Live 2026 alongside Peter Diamandis and Emad Mostaque, she argued that the most important use of artificial intelligence is in healthcare. She also said the life-sciences sector had been "left for dead" in the markets. A later answer in the session went further and called healthcare the most undervalued space in the AI theme. The recording does not confirm who gave that answer. The session was recorded on September 25, 2026 and released as an episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis on September 29.
Why she expects active investing to return
Wood was asked where investors now stand after years of swinging between dismissal, fear and optimism about new technology. She answered with a short history of how big money is managed.
After the tech and telecom crash of the early 2000s, and "even more so" after the 2008–09 financial crisis, large institutional investors in public stock markets moved toward passive investing, she said. A passive fund does not pick stocks. It buys the companies in an index, such as the S&P 500, in proportion to their size and simply copies how the index performs.
Wood says this leaves a gap. The companies she thinks are building the future "are not big parts of the indexes," apart from a few of the largest tech names. She said the ChatGPT moment moved the market some of the way toward seeing this. Even so, an investor could still hold the handful of giant tech stocks that dominate the indexes and be fine with that. The companies "really harnessing AI in the healthcare space," she said, "are not big parts of the benchmark." So she expects "more truly active equity management": investors picking individual companies instead of buying the whole index. "I think the pendulum is going to start swinging in the other direction," she said.
Healthcare, "left for dead"
Her main evidence is what ARK calls the multi-omics revolution. The term covers the life sciences work of reading the body's many layers of biological data, such as genes and proteins, and combining them. Wood said this sector was "left for dead in the markets," even as evidence built up that "the most profound application of AI is in healthcare."
She sees 2026 as the year that began to change, because Anthropic and OpenAI started talking about healthcare as a market of its own. Both companies announced healthcare products in January. OpenAI for Healthcare, announced on January 8, is aimed at institutions. It retrieves medical evidence with citations, connects to hospital policies and offers reusable workflows for discharge summaries, patient instructions and authorization paperwork. OpenAI says clinicians stay responsible for decisions and that content from healthcare workspaces is not used to train its models. Three days later, Anthropic described connectors that let its Claude models draw on Medicare coverage policies, ICD-10 diagnosis codes and the national registry of healthcare providers. One of its examples combines coverage rules, clinical criteria and patient records to draft a prior-authorization decision for an insurer to review. Another gathers supporting material to appeal a denied claim. These first products mostly target the paperwork and workflows of medicine, not new treatments.
"Walking proprietary data factories"
Wood's reason for thinking the opportunity is large starts with the human body. "Each one of us is a data factory," she said. She put the number of cells in a human body at 35 to 40 trillion. She first said 6 billion base pairs, the chemical letters of DNA, then corrected herself to 3 billion. "We are walking proprietary data factories," she said. In her view, that volume of biological information is the raw material AI can work with. She said she is encouraged that the market is waking up to that and "actually starting to pay some attention."
The Moderna question
The discussion then turned to Moderna. A question described its stock as having made the biggest one-day gain of any stock in a major index. The episode does not verify that claim, and the listed sources do not cover stock-price history. The answer that followed said the jump made sense. If what the company had done, and what seemed to be approved, is what the speaker thought it was, a vaccine against cancer, that would be unbelievably good. The recording does not confirm who gave this answer.
The cancer-vaccine news most likely behind the question was not an approval. On August 19, 2026, Merck and Moderna announced positive interim results from a Phase 3 trial, the late-stage test usually needed before a drug can be approved. The trial enrolled 1,137 patients with stage IIB–IV skin melanoma whose tumors had been completely removed by surgery. It compared Moderna's individualized mRNA therapy, intismeran, given with Merck's immunotherapy drug Keytruda, against Keytruda alone. The therapy is built from each patient's own tumor mutations and can encode up to 34 of them, aiming to train the immune system to attack cancer cells. The companies reported statistically significant improvements in how long patients lived without the cancer returning or spreading to distant parts of the body. They reported no new safety signals. They did not release the size of the benefit, and follow-up on overall survival was still going on. They described the therapy as investigational and said they planned regulatory submissions.
The same answer cautioned that the area will not lift every company equally, saying there will be major winners and losers. It still called healthcare the most undervalued, underappreciated space in the AI theme.
Why the two kinds of analysts talk past each other
The answer also gave one reason the market might miss this: the research world is split in two. Healthcare and tech, it said, do not play well together in research. Healthcare analysts are very cautious about tech, because moving fast and breaking things does not work in healthcare. Tech analysts dislike healthcare because it is too bureaucratic, too regulated, too political, and too hostage to insurance companies and reimbursement cycles. So a company that combines the two fields can fall between the specialists who would each cover half of it.
The answer still framed that overlap as the opportunity. It described a massive convergence, repeated that healthcare is AI's most profound application, and said the light bulb had just gone on this year.
Diamandis explained why he cares about this from another angle. He said he often speaks about longevity to wealthy family offices and YPO chapters. He asks them how much of their wealth they would give for an extra 20 or 30 healthy years. "When they're honest about it, it's nearly everything," he said. That is why he splits his life between AI and longevity, which he called "the two biggest markets and two most impactful markets on the planet."