Steve Jobs’ son Reed Jobs seeks UK cancer care investments

Reed Jobs, the son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, is in the United Kingdom seeking investment opportunities in cancer care, driven by the experience of watching his father die from a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2011 at age 56.

I saw my dad have cancer when I was a kid, and unfortunately that happens far too often. And that really motivated me to try to transform outcomes for other people out there, Jobs said.

Jobs, now 34, runs Yosemite, a San Francisco-based oncology-focused venture capital fund that manages more than $1 billion in assets and has already invested in about 20 health care startups.

Yosemite has invested in companies including Tune Therapeutics, Azalea Therapeutics, Chai Discovery and Sage Care in the United States, as well as some U.K. firms that have not been publicly announced, with a focus on gene therapy, cancer vaccines, radiopharmaceuticals and artificial intelligence.

As a firm, we invest in companies internationally, and we would love to look at opportunities in the UK, Jobs said on the sidelines of a life sciences conference in London hosted by the British nonprofit group LifeArc. We’re here to meet with pharmaceutical partners and academics.

Yosemite receives investment from LifeArc, which focuses on rare diseases and was established in 2000 as part of the U.K.’s Medical Research Council, and has partnerships with Oxford and Cambridge universities through philanthropic grants. Research here is world class, Jobs said.

Named after the California national park where his parents married in 1991, Yosemite operates both a for-profit venture investing in health care companies and a donor-advised fund that awards grants to scientists conducting early-stage research.

Jobs, who completed an oncology internship at Stanford University at age 15 and later began pre-medical studies there before switching to history, said he chose to focus on cancer because of his personal experience, having also lost a close friend to leukemia in adulthood.

The venture was spun off in 2023 from Emerson Collective, a philanthropic and investment group founded by his mother, Laurene Powell Jobs, where Reed had served as managing director of health.

Yosemite is backed by the U.S. biotech company Amgen, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and billionaire investor John Doerr after a fundraiser earlier this year.

Jobs hopes that within his lifetime, cancer will shift from being an end-stage disease to an illness that is diagnosed early, monitored and treated, similar to advances made with HIV and cardiovascular disease.

Today far too many cancers are either diagnosed incidentally, because there’s no good early biomarker, or only diagnosed once they are metastatic and extremely advanced, he added.

That is unacceptable. We think that in the course of my lifetime and the current generation, that is going to really change, not only through better detection, but also through better targeted and personalised therapy, Jobs said.

In recent years, medications that harness the body’s immune system to fight tumors have started to transform cancer care. Immunotherapy is an area that we’re extremely active in, Jobs said. It’s one of the areas I think is going to have the most promise for patients in the next couple of decades.

He noted that 20% of cancers are classified as rare. Another conference speaker, Lone Friis, who runs the C-Further pediatric oncology program at LifeArc, said that while childhood cancers are rare, with 4,000 new cases diagnosed annually in the U.K., cancer remains the leading cause of death by disease in children and treatments are limited.

While up to 150 new treatments such as immunotherapies have been developed for adults, only eight new medications targeted at children have been approved in the last two decades. We need to do better, Friis said.