Jobs (34 years old) runs San Francisco-based Yosemite Investment Company, which manages more than $1 billion in assets and backs companies that are developing cancer treatments, gene editing technology, radiopharmaceuticals, and artificial intelligence tools for health care.Speaking during the Translational Research Summit hosted by LifeArc in London, Jobs talked about how his father’s battle with cancer shaped his focus on oncology research and investing, The Guardian reported.“I saw my father have cancer when I was a child, and unfortunately this happens all too often,” Jobs said at the summit.“That’s what really motivated me to try to change outcomes for other people out there.”Steve Jobs died in 2011 at the age of 56 after battling a rare type of pancreatic cancer.Jobs added that Yosemite is exploring opportunities in the United Kingdom and is meeting with pharmaceutical companies, academics and researchers as part of its international investment plans.
“As a company, we invest in companies internationally, and we would like to look at opportunities in the UK,” he said.Yosemite has invested in about 20 healthcare startups, including companies working in cancer vaccines, gene therapy and AI-based drug development. The company has also backed some UK-based companies that have not yet been publicly announced.The project was launched in 2023 after it was spun off from Emerson Collective, the investment and philanthropic organization founded by Jobs’ mother, Laurene Powell Jobs.Yosemite is backed by several foundations and major investors, including Amgen, MIT and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.Jobs said he hopes future advances in medicine will turn cancer into a disease that can be detected earlier and treated more effectively.“Today, too many cancers are either diagnosed incidentally, because there is no good early biomarker, or are only diagnosed when they are widespread and very advanced,” he said.“This is unacceptable.”He also pointed to immunotherapy as one of the most promising areas of cancer treatment in the coming decades.“It’s one of the areas that I think will have great promise for patients in the next couple of decades,” Jobs said.
