A new company founded by Deep Science Ventures veterans has closed a £1.5 million (~$2m) pre-seed round and secured £700,000 (~$950K) Innovate UK funding. 

Big Picture Bio has been founded to identify, design and optimise promising cancer combination therapies, using a generative world model to understand how tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue interact across disease sites and patient subgroups.  

The total funding provides £2.2 million (~$3m) to support Big Picture Bio as the company takes its first designed drug combinations from in-silico design into wet-lab validation. 

The company’s platform has been validated against real-world clinical outcomes presented at ASCO, as well as correctly predicting the failure of Regeneron’s recent fianlimab trial.  

Big Picture Bio was founded by Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, CEO and Co-Founder, and Dr Mark Hammond, CTO and Co-Founder, bringing extensive experience across drug discovery, venture creation and AI-enabled scientific discovery.  

Kerstin previously served as Director of Pharma at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), where she founded 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies, while Mark co-founded DSV and led its engineering work in agentic scientific discovery. 

Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, CEO and Co-Founder, Big Picture Bio, 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.”