Reed Jobs, son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, is focusing on developing Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture capital firm he launched in 2023. According to a recent interview with TechCrunch, Yosemite is working to close its second fund with a target of $350 million. The capital will be used to spin out new biotech companies from early academic research and integrate AI into both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Detailed Developments
Three years after its launch amid a post-pandemic biotech crash, Yosemite now has a team of 17 and has invested in approximately 25 companies across both funds. Reed Jobs noted that about one-third of the new fund will be dedicated to creating companies alongside academic institutions like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. The remaining capital will be allocated to joining funding rounds led by other investors. Additionally, the firm directs 2.5% of its assets under management into a donor-advised fund to support early-stage scientific ideas through no-strings-attached grants.
Technical & Technology Analysis
The convergence of artificial intelligence and biology is bringing significant breakthroughs in how drugs target proteins. Previously, medicine could only drug about 15% of the human genome because many proteins had smooth surfaces without pockets for drug molecules to bind. Thanks to AI, scientists have discovered cryptic pockets on the KRAS oncogene to develop targeted therapies. Yosemite is also supporting companies like Tune Therapeutics, which uses epigenetic editing to silence disease-causing genes by adding or removing methyl groups without altering the original DNA sequence.
Expert Opinions & Insights
Reed Jobs believes that AI's current role is to accelerate repetitive tasks with high reproducibility rather than performing them better than humans. However, one of the most promising applications he highlighted is using AI to build "synthetic control arms" in clinical trials. This approach could halve the number of patients needed for clinical recruitment, potentially saving hundreds of millions of dollars per Phase 3 trial.
Impact & Future
In addition to AI and genetics, Yosemite is making a significant investment in Histosonics, a medical device company that uses histotripsy to destroy liver tumors non-invasively. Reed Jobs believes this is a golden era as GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are showing indirect cancer-preventing capabilities by controlling obesity, which is one of the leading pan-disease risk factors alongside smoking.