Beyond Meat just launched a new product that’s even further from meat than ever before: a protein soda. Beyond Immerse is the company’s first product that makes no attempt to replicate meat whatsoever, marking a sharp shift in Beyond’s business model. It might seem like it comes out of left field, but it all clicks into place once you know just how badly the veggie burger business is working out for Beyond. A pivot to protein is still a long shot for a company that’s never turned an annual profit — but it’s an attempt to tap into the one market left that might offer it hope.
Immerse is an oddity in and of itself. Unlike most protein drinks, which are usually chalky at best, it claims to be “crisp and refreshing” and comes in three fruity flavors: Peach Mango, Lemon Lime, and Orange Tangerine. Each flavor then comes in two versions, with either 10g or 20g of protein, at either 60 or 100 calories per 12oz can, with 7g of fiber either way.
As you’d expect from Beyond, Immerse is entirely plant-based. The protein comes from peas and the fiber from tapioca, with stevia, “natural flavors,” and a few juice concentrates and food colorings to round out the ingredient list. Beyond makes sure this ticks off a few more of the health food boxes, promising plenty of antioxidants and electrolytes too.
Immerse’s macronutrients are almost suspiciously impressive. I drink a protein shake most days, and 100 calories’ worth of my powder of choice would only net me 19g of protein and essentially no fiber at all, delivered in a semi-palatable sludge that I must try — and fail — to convince myself tastes like a milkshake. If Immerse can actually deliver better macros, and is as “crisp and invigorating” as Beyond promises, the appeal is obvious. Other people seem to agree. On the Beyond Test Kitchen site, where the limited first run of Immerse is exclusively available, every released flavor is already sold out.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. Protein snacks, drinks, and supplements are a big and growing business. US sales of ready-made protein shakes grew 71 percent between 2021 and 2025, and they’re now an $8 billion market. Much of that protein comes from dairy-based whey, but plant-based protein is growing too — sales of both drinks and powders grew 11 percent from 2023 to 2024 according to the Good Food Institute, making up a $450 million business in its own right. Those numbers pale in comparison to the larger “functional drinks” market — prebiotics, probiotics, fiber, protein, electrolytes, preworkout, postworkout, CBD, and more — that was worth over $200 billion in 2024 and is only expected to grow from here. The drinks fridge in my local store is overflowing with gut-friendly kombucha, cold-pressed ginger shots, and electrolyte-packed recovery drinks from brands big and small, with more every time I look. Poppi, a prebiotic soda that touts the benefits of apple cider vinegar, has drawn investment from Shark Tank, spent millions to run Super Bowl ads two years in a row, and in 2025 was acquired by Pepsi for a cool $1.95 billion (it also settled a class action lawsuit alleging its “gut-healthy” claims were misleading, but hey, it can’t all be good news).
If there’s one thing Beyond needs right now, it’s profit
You can see why Beyond wants in. It’s already got “pioneering expertise in unlocking the power of plants,” according to founder and CEO Ethan Brown, and is one of the few brands in plant-based food that can truly claim to be a household name. More to the point, protein drinks are clearly profitable — and if there’s one thing Beyond needs right now, it’s profit.
Beyond Meat was founded by Brown in 2009 and within a few years was generating excited headlines suggesting that the future of food was here. In 2019, Beyond went public; its shares launched at $25 each but rose to $65 on the first day of trading, making it the fastest-growing US IPO since Palm Inc. in 2000. A few months later shares peaked at just under $240 each, giving the company a valuation of over $14 billion. It secured supermarket distribution with Walmart, Target, and Kroger; supplied its fake meat to McDonald’s, KFC, and Subway.
But the glory days didn’t last long. Beyond has posted straight losses ever since it went public. Profit sometimes seems like an optional afterthought in modern capitalism, but if investors don’t see profit, they do expect to see growth, and that’s where Beyond has stalled: after a peak in 2021, Beyond’s annual revenue has steadily declined, down to $326 million in 2024. None of those fast food deals yielded permanent products on US menus. Beyond’s stock price has been in freefall for years, aside from a short-lived rally as a meme stock last October. It’s currently trading at below a dollar per share, placing it at risk of being delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange, and is facing a class action lawsuit from its own shareholders, who allege it hid the need for a $77.4 million write-down of aging assets.
What went wrong? While Beyond Meat’s management have no doubt made mistakes over the years, really it’s simply the highest profile victim of a collapse in the market for meatless meat. The Good Food Institute found that US plant-based meat sales had dropped 7 percent from 2023 to 2024, marking the third straight year of decline. “The category is smaller today than it was two years ago, four years ago, five years ago,” Peter McGuinness, the CEO of Beyond’s chief rival Impossible Foods, told New York earlier this month. “That’s not good.”
In fact Beyond and Impossible have arguably done well by surviving so long, but both are struggling. Impossible has never delivered on long-rumored plans for an IPO of its own, likely put off by Beyond’s public problems, but has suffered repeated rounds of layoffs; last year McGuinness told The Wall Street Journal that profitability was likely years away.
By 2025, only 22 percent of Americans were trying to reduce their meat intake, down from 37 percent three years earlier
Both companies sit at the nexus of two major trends that are working against them. The first is that meat is back on the menu. The Good Food Institute notes a 4 percent decline in sales of plant-based foods between 2023 and 2024, while the Food Industry Association found that meat sales grew almost 5 percent over the same period, to a record $105 billion. The number of vegetarians and vegans has declined, with Gallup’s 2023 Consumption Habits poll estimating 1 percent of the US population are vegan and 4 percent vegetarian, down from 3 percent and 5 percent in 2018. But vegetarians were never meant to be Beyond’s whole market — it was supposed to persuade swathes of the rest of us to eat less meat in favor of plant-based alternatives. For a while it seemed to be working — by 2023, nearly half of US restaurants offered vegan menu options, and cutting back on meat consumption, especially to reduce climate impact, was at the core of the cultural zeitgeist. But by 2025, only 22 percent of Americans were trying to reduce their meat intake, down from 37 percent three years earlier.
That would be bad enough for Beyond, but it has a second problem: processed food is out too. And a patty of pea protein, oils, and starches, pushed through an extruder and treated so that it will appear to bleed, is pretty darn processed. Researchers have linked ultra-processed foods (UPFs) to 32 different harmful health effects, The Lancet has labeled them a global health threat, and San Francisco is suing processed food giants. Then there’s RFK Jr., whose new dietary guidelines include perhaps the only part of current American health policy I could get behind, urging Americans to limit highly processed foods (and, in a double whammy for Beyond, to eat more meat). There’s no real evidence yet of a decline in sales of UPFs as a whole, but anyone trying to eat more healthily right now is unlikely to be recommended Beyond patties. Instead they might be told to eat whole foods, to stick to snacks with fewer than five ingredients, to eat more meat but maybe cut back on beef. Beyond doesn’t enter the picture.
This all goes some way to explaining why Beyond has turned for salvation in, of all things, soda. Next time you’re passing a supermarket drinks fridge, take a look at the “wellness drinks” on offer. You know two things they almost all have in common? They don’t include meat (I hope), and they’re pretty heavily processed. Health-conscious eaters don’t want their food to be made in a factory or packed with preservatives, but rarely seem to mind when it comes to what they drink. My Instagram feed is packed with fitfluencers promoting “clean” eating and whole foods, while they shill branded discount codes for processed protein powders. There’s a double standard at work that likely won’t last forever, but as long as it does, you can see why Beyond Meat wants to take full advantage.
It’s unlikely that a protein soda, no matter how refreshing or fiber-packed, will turn Beyond’s fortunes round entirely. But right now it doesn’t need that: it just needs time. Time to persuade investors to stick around, time to pull the share price up by a buck or two, and maybe just time for food fads to change once more and give meatless meat a second life.
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![Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name | TechCrunch
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting 0 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that 0 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like 0 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about 0 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma? You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Reed #Jobs #talk #curing #cancer #TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/53200091183_f376523593_k.jpg?w=680 "Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name | TechCrunch
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting 0 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that 0 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like 0 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about 0 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma? You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Reed #Jobs #talk #curing #cancer #TechCrunch")
![Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name | TechCrunch
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting 0 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that 0 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like 0 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about 0 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma? You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Reed #Jobs #talk #curing #cancer #TechCrunch](https://i2.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/53200091183_f376523593_k.jpg?w=680&ssl=1 "Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name | TechCrunch
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting 0 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that 0 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like 0 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about 0 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma? You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Reed #Jobs #talk #curing #cancer #TechCrunch")
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