Few countries have a stronger reason to care about longevity than Italy — a fact not lost on investor Nicole Junkermann. At the beginning of 2026, 25.1 per cent of Italy’s population was aged 65 or over, making it the oldest country in the European Union by the proportion of over-65s.
Istat estimates that 14.8 million residents are now aged 65 or above, up by more than 240,000 in a single year. The country also has 2.5 million people aged 85 or over, while the average age of the population has reached 47.1.
Those numbers are normally discussed as a fiscal and demographic problem. They are also beginning to define a large market for technologies that can help people remain healthier later into life.
Nicole Junkermann, founder of NJF Holdings, has been building exposure to this area through NJF Capital, the venture investment arm of NJF Holdings. Her portfolio spans biotechnology and artificial intelligence, two fields that are increasingly converging around the challenge of improving healthspan.
What Nicole Junkermann Means by Healthspan Over Lifespan The distinction between lifespan and healthspan is particularly important for Italy. A country with a shrinking working-age population gains relatively little from additional years of life if those years are accompanied by a long period of severe illness or dependency.
Medical innovation that delays disease or preserves independence can therefore have consequences far beyond healthcare. It can affect the burden on families, social care systems and labour-market participation.
Cambrian Biopharma, one of the companies backed within Nicole Junkermann’s wider life sciences portfolio, illustrates the more serious scientific side of the longevity industry. The company is developing therapeutics targeting biological processes associated with ageing, including a programme focused on selective mTORC1 inhibition.
This approach differs markedly from the speculative image sometimes attached to longevity. The emphasis is on specific biological mechanisms and outcomes that can be evaluated through recognised medical development processes.
Artificial intelligence is likely to become another important part of the same story. Ageing is biologically complex, and improved computational tools can help researchers analyse the relationships between disease, genetics and clinical outcomes.
For Nicole Junkermann and NJF Holdings, the link between those investments is that healthier ageing won’t emerge from one technology. It will depend on better understanding of disease, earlier diagnosis and more precise treatment, all of which increasingly rely on sophisticated analysis of medical data.
Italy is already living through the demographic transition
Italy’s over-85 population increased by more than 100,000 in a single year, and the number of centenarians has reached almost 25,000. Meanwhile, the working-age population fell again, underlining how rapidly the demographic balance is changing.
That gives Italy a particularly strong economic incentive to support technologies that preserve independence and health later in life. An intervention that allows someone to remain active into their 80s can change their personal experience of ageing while also reducing pressure elsewhere in the economy.
Nicole Junkermann has placed this idea within the Human Code philosophy associated with NJF Holdings. Its central premise is that technological progress should be assessed partly through what it does for human capability, rather than treating efficiency as the only measure that matters.
There are still reasons for caution because biotechnology is difficult and ageing is far too complex to be solved by a single intervention. The wider longevity sector has also attracted claims that run ahead of scientific evidence, making careful distinction between serious medicine and marketing especially important.
But Italy’s demographic challenge isn’t hypothetical. The country is already living through the conditions that make healthy longevity economically significant.
For Nicole Junkermann and NJF Holdings, longevity is therefore part of a wider thesis around biotechnology, artificial intelligence and human health. For Italy, it could become an increasingly important economic sector because the demand is already visible in the population.
