Big Picture Bio has launched with £2.2 million in funding to develop AI-designed drug combinations for cancer and immune-mediated diseases.

AI platform targets cancer drug combinations

The UK biotech has closed a £1.5 million pre-seed funding round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, with participation from Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White.

The investment is supplemented by £700,000 in non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK through its Investor Partnerships Programme, bringing the company’s total funding to £2.2 million.

Big Picture Bio plans to use the funding to move its first drug combinations from computational design into wet-lab validation.

The company was founded by Kerstin Papenfuss, CEO and co-founder, and Mark Hammond, CTO and co-founder, both veterans of Deep Science Ventures.

Its platform uses a generative world model to examine interactions between tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue across disease sites and patient subgroups. The company is initially focusing on cancer and immune-mediated diseases, with the aim of identifying drug combinations and treatment sequences that could reduce residual disease.

Modelling combinations before laboratory testing

Combination therapy can create a large number of potential treatment options, making it difficult to test candidates systematically using laboratory experiments alone.

Big Picture Bio says its models are designed to identify combinations with potential clinical relevance before they are taken into experimental testing.

The company’s platform has also been assessed against real-world clinical outcomes presented at ASCO. Big Picture Bio said its model correctly predicted the failure of Regeneron’s fianlimab trial, using clinical prediction as a way to test whether its models are identifying combinations with potential for clinical impact.

The company says the model reasons from underlying biology, allowing its predictions to be traced back to the biological mechanisms behind them.

Kerstin Papenfuss said: “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.”

Deep Science Ventures experience

Papenfuss previously served as director of pharma at Deep Science Ventures, where she founded 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies. Hammond co-founded Deep Science Ventures and led its engineering work in agentic scientific discovery.

Big Picture Bio is also supported by advisers with experience across oncology, target validation, drug discovery, translational biology and commercial strategy.

The advisory team includes Laura Rosenberg, director of target validation at AstraZeneca; Duncan Young, head of search and evaluation, oncology business development and licensing at AstraZeneca; Garry Pairaudeau, CEO and co-founder of DaltonTx and former CTO of Exscientia; and Christian Dillon, chief scientific officer at PhoreMost.

The company’s next step is to take its AI-designed drug combinations into wet-lab validation, providing an experimental test of the platform’s approach to cancer combination therapy.