Big Picture Bio has secured £2.2 million in combined equity and non-dilutive funding to advance its AI platform, which uses a generative world model to design cancer drug combinations by modelling tumour, immune and microenvironmental interactions.
Cancer drug discovery company Big Picture Bio has secured £2.2 million in funding to develop potential cancer combination therapies using artificial intelligence and laboratory testing.
The company, which has been founded to identify, design and optimise promising cancer drug combinations, has closed a £1.5 million pre-seed funding round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures. Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White also participated.
The financing is supplemented by £700,000 in non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK through its Investor Partnerships Programme, taking the company’s total funding to approximately $3 million.
Big Picture Bio will use the funding to move its first AI-designed drug combinations from computer modelling into wet-lab validation.
AI model targets complex cancer biology
The company’s platform uses a generative world model to examine how tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue interact across different disease sites and patient subgroups.
Big Picture Bio says its approach is designed to tackle a major challenge in oncology drug discovery: identifying combinations that have a greater likelihood of working in patients.
Rather than focusing on individual drug targets, the company aims to model cancer as a dynamic biological system and use this information to design combinations of treatments.
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.”
Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, CEO and Co-Founder, Big Picture Bio
Model tested against clinical outcomes
Big Picture Bio says its platform has been validated against real-world clinical outcomes presented at ASCO. The model correctly predicted the failure of Regeneron’s recent fianlimab trial.
Ultimately, clinical prediction is not the company’s end goal. Instead, it uses comparisons with clinical outcomes to assess whether its models are identifying drug combinations with potential for clinical impact.
Its modelling approach is designed to provide explainable predictions that can be traced back to underlying biology.
Experienced team
Papenfuss previously served as Director of Pharma at Deep Science Ventures, where she founded 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies.
The company is also supported by advisers with experience in oncology, target validation, drug discovery, translational biology and commercial strategy, including experts from AstraZeneca, DaltonTx, Exscientia (now Recursion) and PhoreMost.
I had the privilege of working closely with Kerstin and Mark at the very beginning of Deep Science Ventures and saw first-hand the determination, conviction and sheer resolve they bring to building ambitious, scalable businesses. 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.”
Remy Kesrouani, Managing Partner at Kadmos Capital
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