AI Startup's Bold Bet on Cancer Cures Lands $2.8M

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-18

Big Picture Bio, a London-based biotech startup, just emerged from stealth with a combined funding round of $2.8 million. They're on a mission to change how we develop cancer drugs using AI-designed combinations. And honestly, it's about time someone tackled this problem head-on. ### The Funding Breakdown The funding includes a $1.9 million pre-Seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, plus $890,000 in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships Programme. Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White also chipped in. Not bad for a company that's been flying under the radar. ### The Minds Behind the Mission Founded by CEO Dr. Kerstin Papenfuss and CTO Dr. Mark Hammond, Big Picture Bio has built a generative "world model" that simulates how tumors, immune cells, and surrounding tissue interact. The goal? Figure out which drug combinations—and in what sequence—are most likely to outsmart cancer resistance. Before spinning out Big Picture Bio, both founders spent years at Deep Science Ventures. Papenfuss built and led DSV's therapeutics team, founding 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies. Hammond co-founded DSV and grew it from $190,000 to a portfolio worth over $1.2 billion. They've been working together for seven years, and they've clearly got the chops. ### Why This Matters Here's the thing: a full pairwise screen of just 100 drugs at 100 doses would require roughly 50 million lab experiments. That's a scale no physical lab can reach. But Big Picture Bio's models can search computationally in seconds. They've already tested their approach against real clinical data, correctly predicting the failure of Regeneron's fianlimab trial and posting 14 predictions ahead of the 2026 ASCO oncology conference—12 of which proved accurate. > "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," said Dr. Kerstin Papenfuss, CEO and co-founder. She added, "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." ### What's Next? Big Picture Bio will use the funding to take its AI-designed cancer combination therapies from computer models into the wet lab. They'll initially focus on cancer and immune-mediated diseases but aim to move beyond trial-and-error combination testing altogether. The company's advisory team includes senior pharma experts from AstraZeneca, Exscientia, and PhoreMost, so they're not going it alone. This isn't just another AI biotech story. It's a fundamental shift in how we approach drug development. And if Big Picture Bio succeeds, it could mean faster, cheaper, and more effective treatments for some of the hardest-to-treat diseases. That's something worth watching.