London-based Big Picture Bio Ltd has been founded to identify, design and optimise cancer combination therapies. It uses a generative world model of how tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue interact across disease sites and patient subgroups. The company, which announced its launch on 17 September 2026, pairs AI-driven modelling with targeted wet lab validation. It aims to tackle one of the hardest problems in oncology drug discovery: finding combinations with a greater likelihood of working in patients.

Funding to move from in silico design to the bench

Big Picture Bio has closed a £1.5 million pre-seed round, co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures. Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White also took part. The round sits alongside £700,000 of non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK through its Investor Partnerships Programme, giving a combined £2.2 million. The company will use the funds to take its first designed drug combinations from in silico design into wet lab validation.

The initial focus is cancer and immune-mediated diseases. The platform seeks optimal combinations of drugs, and their sequencing, to minimise residual disease.

Testing predictions against clinical outcomes

The company says its platform has been validated against real-world clinical outcomes presented at ASCO. It also reports that the platform correctly predicted the failure of Regeneron’s recent fianlimab trial. Big Picture Bio does not position clinical prediction as its end product. It uses this validation to test whether its models are identifying combinations with potential for clinical impact. The model reasons from the ground up, so its predictions are fully explainable and can be traced back to the underlying biology.

Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, chief executive officer and co-founder, noted that more than 900 billion combinations are possible, too many for any laboratory to test exhaustively. “Cancer is not one disease driven by one target, but we still develop drugs as if it were,” she said. Her aim is to “model the disease as the dynamic system it actually is, then design against it”. She added: “This funding takes our first designed combinations out of the model and into the lab.”

Founders and advisers

Papenfuss was previously Director of Pharma at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), where she founded 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies. Dr Mark Hammond, chief technology officer and co-founder, co-founded DSV and led its engineering work in agentic scientific discovery.

The advisory team spans oncology, target validation, drug discovery, translational biology and commercial strategy. It includes Dr Laura Rosenberg, Director of Target Validation at AstraZeneca, and Dr Duncan Young, Head of Search & Evaluation, Oncology Business Development & Licensing at AstraZeneca. Dr Garry Pairaudeau, chief executive officer and co-founder of DaltonTx and former chief technology officer of Exscientia, and Dr Christian Dillon, chief scientific officer at PhoreMost, also advise the company.

Dom Falcao, founder of Deep Science Ventures, commented that the founders had steered DSV through the creation of companies including Neobe, Cureage and Kindling, and that “almost every company they have built is on track to make it into the clinic”.

Remy Kesrouani, Managing Partner at Kadmos Capital, said the company was “applying a genuinely differentiated approach to AI to one of drug development’s hardest problems”. Paolo Pio, co-founder and General Partner at Exceptional Ventures, noted that the problem lies in “how to identify the right combination therapies faster and with greater confidence”.

For more information, visit: https://bigpicturebio.com