AI Startup's Bold Bet Could Change How We Treat Cancer

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-18

Cancer is relentless. It adapts, resists, and outsmarts our best drugs. But what if we could predict its next move before it happens? That's the ambitious goal of Big Picture Bio, a London-based biotech startup that just emerged from stealth with a combined funding round of €2.55 million (about $2.75 million). ### A New Approach to an Old Problem Big Picture Bio is developing AI-designed combination therapies for cancer and other complex diseases. Instead of relying on trial-and-error lab testing, they've built a generative "world model" that simulates how tumors, immune cells, and surrounding tissue interact. The idea is to identify which drug combinations—and in what sequence—are most likely to overcome cancer resistance. "Cancer is not one disease driven by one target, but we still develop drugs as if it were," says Dr. Kerstin Papenfuss, CEO and co-founder. "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's where AI comes in. A full pairwise screen of just 100 drugs at 100 doses would require roughly 50 million lab experiments. Big Picture Bio's models can search that space computationally in seconds. ### The Funding Breakdown The funding comprises a €1.75 million (about $1.9 million) pre-Seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, alongside €815,000 (about $880,000) in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships Programme. Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White also participated. "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," said Remy Kesrouani, Managing Partner at Kadmos Capital. ### Proven Predictions The company says its predictive approach has already been tested against real clinical data. It correctly forecasted the failure of Regeneron's fianlimab trial and posted 14 predictions ahead of the 2026 ASCO oncology conference, of which 12 proved accurate. ### The Team Behind the Tech Founded by CEO Dr. Kerstin Papenfuss and CTO Dr. Mark Hammond, Big Picture Bio has deep roots in Deep Science Ventures (DSV). Papenfuss built and led DSV's therapeutics team, founding 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies. Hammond co-founded DSV and took it "from €174k to a €1.16 billion+ portfolio." The pair have worked together for seven years, tackling complex, evolving diseases. Their advisory team includes senior pharma experts from AstraZeneca, Exscientia, and PhoreMost. ### What's Next? The funding will take Big Picture Bio's AI-designed cancer combination therapies from computer models into the wet lab. The firm will initially focus on cancer and immune-mediated diseases but aims to move beyond trial-and-error combination testing altogether. "This funding takes our first designed combinations out of the model and into the lab," Papenfuss says. If successful, Big Picture Bio could drastically cut the time and cost of developing new cancer treatments—and maybe even predict which trials will fail before they start. That's a future worth watching.