Is longevity the most exciting space for an investor to be working in today? Nicole Junkermann certainly thinks that if it’s not the most exciting area, then it is undeniably one of them. Junkermann is an international investor and serial entrepreneur who has started and sold businesses before founding venture capital firm NJF Capital in 2012. Among her investments is Cambrian Biopharma, the American biotech start-up that is taking a multi-pronged approach to developing therapeutics to elongate what they call “healthspan”.
What exactly is a healthspan?
Junkermann explains: “As a similar concept to lifespan, healthspan refers to the time during which a person has a good quality of life. You can expend time, money and research on making someone’s lifespan far longer, but there’s no point in doing that unless they are also happy and healthy during that time.”
As such, Cambrian are not trying to develop technology that will help someone who would live to 90 to instead live to 150 so much as to ensure that a 90-year-old might have a life as free from the chronic disease and pain associated with ageing as someone considerably younger. “This is essentially a humane and compassionate long-term goal,” says Junkermann. “There are several factors associated with ageing – nine that are generally accepted, to be exact – and they each carry slightly different downsides to them. For example, cells begin to lose their ability to regenerate from a very early age, and eventually, this means that adults heal more slowly than children or young people. If we could slow this process down, then older people could be spared the chronic pain that many suffer from.”
