Big Picture Bio, a cancer drug discovery startup, has raised £1.5 million in a pre-seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, with participation from Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White. The round sits alongside £700,000 in non-dilutive funding awarded by Innovate UK through its Investor Partnerships Programme, taking total funding to £2.2 million.
More than 900 billion drug combinations are theoretically possible in oncology, far more than any laboratory can test, so combinations are often chosen because they are the ones within reach rather than the ones most likely to work. Big Picture Bio's platform uses a generative world model to understand how tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue interact across disease sites and patient subgroups, then designs combinations and treatment sequencing intended to minimise residual disease. AI-driven modelling is paired with targeted wet-lab validation, and because the model reasons from the ground up, its predictions are explainable and can be traced back to the underlying biology. The initial focus is cancer and immune-mediated diseases.
The platform has been validated against real-world clinical outcomes presented at ASCO and correctly predicted the failure of Regeneron's recent fianlimab trial. Rather than positioning clinical prediction as the end product, Big Picture Bio uses that validation to test whether its models are identifying combinations with potential for clinical impact.
Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, CEO and co-founder, previously served as Director of Pharma at Deep Science Ventures, where she founded 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies. Dr Mark Hammond, CTO and co-founder, co-founded Deep Science Ventures and led its engineering work in agentic scientific discovery. The advisory team includes Laura Rosenberg, Director of Target Validation at AstraZeneca; Dr Duncan Young, Head of Search & Evaluation, Oncology Business Development & Licensing at AstraZeneca; Dr Garry Pairaudeau, CEO and co-founder of DaltonTx and former CTO of Exscientia; and Dr Christian Dillon, Chief Scientific Officer at PhoreMost.
The funding supports Big Picture Bio as it takes its first designed drug combinations from in-silico design into wet-lab validation.
Cancer is not one disease driven by one target, but we still develop drugs as if it were. Combinations are how we beat it – and with more than 900 billion of them possible, no lab on earth can test its way to the right ones. That is the problem we built Big Picture Bio to solve: model the disease as the dynamic system it actually is, then design against it – combinations chosen because they are most likely to work in patients, not because they were the ones we could get to. This funding takes our first designed combinations out of the model and into the lab.
For a decade, Mark and Kerstin have steered DSV through the creation of a slew of extremely exciting companies solving precisely these kinds of complex diseases, including Neobe, Cureage and Kindling, and almost every company they have built is on track to make it into the clinic. Instilling that experience and expertise into a model that moves beyond the bleeding edge in AI to solve complex diseases at scale is a natural evolution of the methodology for building advanced therapeutics companies at DSV. It's been the greatest privilege of my career to build DSV alongside Mark and Kerstin and I am so glad DSV can be a part of the next phase of their journey.
I had the privilege of working closely with Kerstin and Mark at the very beginning of Deep Science Ventures, and saw first-hand the determination, conviction and sheer resolve they bring to building ambitious, scalable businesses. Big Picture Bio is the culmination of that journey, applying a genuinely differentiated approach to AI to one of drug development's hardest problems: predicting how complex clinical trials will actually behave.
Big Picture Bio is going after a problem at the heart of modern oncology - how to identify the right combination therapies faster and with greater confidence. We believe the team has the scientific depth, technical ambition and commercial focus to build something genuinely important - a platform that can deliver value to partners today while laying the foundation for the next generation of cancer therapies. We are proud to co-lead the round along with Kadmos and support the company's next stage of growth.
