UK healthcare expansion: Steve Jobs son Reed Jobs plans to invest in cancer startups

Reed Jobs, the son of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, is looking to expand investments in British healthcare startups through his oncology-focused venture firm as he pushes efforts to improve cancer treatment and early detection.Jobs, 34, runs San Francisco-based venture firm Yosemite, which manages more than $1 billion in assets and backs companies developing cancer therapies, gene-editing technology, radiopharmaceuticals and artificial intelligence tools for healthcare.Speaking during the Translational Research Summit hosted in London by LifeArc, Jobs reflected on how his father’s battle with cancer shaped his focus on oncology research and investment, The Guardian reported.“I saw my dad have cancer when I was a kid, and unfortunately that happens far too often,” Jobs said at the summit.“And that really motivated me to try to transform outcomes for other people out there.”Steve Jobs died in 2011 at the age of 56 after battling a rare form of pancreatic cancer.Jobs added that Yosemite is actively exploring opportunities in the UK and meeting pharmaceutical companies, academics and researchers as part of its international investment plans.“As a firm, we invest in companies internationally, and we would love to look at opportunities in the UK,” he said.Yosemite has invested in around 20 healthcare startups, including companies working on cancer vaccines, gene therapy and AI-driven drug development. The firm has also backed some UK-based companies that have not yet been publicly announced.The venture was launched in 2023 after being spun out from Emerson Collective, the investment and philanthropic organisation founded by Jobs’ mother Laurene Powell Jobs.Yosemite is backed by several major institutions and investors, including Amgen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.Jobs said he hopes future advances in medicine will transform cancer into a disease that can be detected earlier and treated more effectively.“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 said.“That is unacceptable.”He also pointed to immunotherapy as one of the most promising areas in cancer treatment over the coming decades.“It’s one of the areas I think is going to have the most promise for patients in the next couple of decades,” Jobs said.