London Biotech's $2.8M Bet on AI-Designed Cancer Drug Combos

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-18

Big Picture Bio, a London-based biotech startup, just stepped out of stealth with $2.8 million to tackle one of cancer's toughest challenges: finding the right drug combinations. And they're doing it with AI that simulates tumors like a living, breathing system. ### The Funding Breakdown The company raised a $1.9 million pre-Seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, plus $880,000 in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships Programme. Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White also joined the round. "I had the privilege of working closely with Kerstin and Mark at the very beginning of Deep Science Ventures," said Remy Kesrouani, Managing Partner at Kadmos Capital. "Big Picture Bio is the culmination of that journey, applying a genuinely differentiated approach to AI to one of drug development's hardest problems." ### A World Model for Cancer 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? To predict which drug combinations—and in what sequence—are most likely to overcome cancer resistance. Both founders spent years at Deep Science Ventures. Papenfuss built and led DSV's therapeutics team, founding 12 companies. Hammond co-founded DSV and grew its portfolio from $190,000 to over $1.2 billion. They argue that a full pairwise screen of just 100 drugs at 100 doses would require roughly 50 million lab experiments. No physical lab can handle that scale. But their models can search computationally in seconds. ### Early Wins and Big Ambitions 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—12 proved accurate. "Cancer is not one disease driven by one target, but we still develop drugs as if it were," said Papenfuss. "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. 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 move its 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. The advisory team includes senior pharma experts from AstraZeneca, Exscientia, and PhoreMost. With this backing, Big Picture Bio is betting that AI can outsmart cancer's complexity—one combination at a time.