Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name
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- Yosemite closed the first tranche of a targeted $350 million second fund, directing roughly a third into companies it builds itself and 2.5% of assets under management into a no-strings-attached donor-advised fund.
- Reed Jobs's firm has grown to a team of 17 and close to 25 portfolio companies since its 2023 launch, with Azalea (born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna's lab) and Quarry (built with Craig Crews around induced-proximity drugs) among its flagship bets.
- Revolution Medicines doubled survival in the most common pancreatic cancer from 12 to 24 months, and Eli Lilly bought Kelonia for $7 billion — two examples Jobs cited as evidence of a pharma M&A spree tied to the industry's largest-ever patent cliff.
- NIH funding faced a proposed 40% cut last year (rejected on a bipartisan basis by the Senate and House) and a proposed 12% cut this year, still the largest cut ever by an order of magnitude and the second consecutive year of record-setting reduction proposals.
- AI-driven synthetic control arms could halve the patients needed in a Phase 3 cancer trial — each costing roughly $260 million — by replacing the untreated comparison group with a computer-generated one, and the FDA is already leaning into the approach.
- Yosemite is going after p53, the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers, with three portfolio companies and multiple strategies, including attacking mutated forms and attempting to turn the tumor suppressor back on.
- Tune Therapeutics is methylating and silencing the hepatitis B virus itself (the disease affects 250 million-plus people and drives most liver cancers), while Histosonics is the firm's rare device bet, using histotripsy to noninvasively destroy liver tumors.
Why it matters: Yosemite is wagering that the convergence of pharma's largest-ever patent cliff, record cash reserves, and AI-accelerated drug discovery will reward specialist oncology shops that build companies themselves rather than scout for existing ones — and the $350 million fund close is the first concrete test of whether LPs buy that thesis at scale.
