Protecting the Scientific Voice in Governance

In the last article, I wrote about what happens when the CEO-Chairman relationship breaks down. The warning signs, the power plays, the conversations that happen before the meeting.

But I didn't follow the story to its conclusion. What happens to the company after the CEO is forced out?

It isn't hyperbolic to say that the aftermath was devastating. The Chairman installed the COO as CEO. The COO had operational skills but no academic research background in the science underpinning the company. For a preclinical biotech built on a career of academic work, this mattered enormously.

The research programmes the previous executive team had built were halted. The platform strategy was abandoned. The company would take just one compound forward, with no additional optimisation. And the scientific founder, whose expertise had created everything the company owned, was systematically side-lined. Demoted from CSO. Excluded from board discussions. Cut off from the research programme they'd created.

The compound failed. The company went bankrupt.

The scientific founder had seen the failure modes that ultimately killed the programme. By the time the asset collapsed, no one with decision-making authority had listened to the now former CSO for over a year. That knowledge was treated as an inconvenience rather than an asset. The operators wanted clean execution. What they got was a single-asset bet that failed, with no backup, and a medicine for children with a devastating rare disease that would never reach them.

This is what happens when the scientific voice loses structural protection. The pattern has a name that deserves wider use: operator capture.

Operator capture is what happens when people who don't understand the biology gain control of strategic decisions in a company that exists because of the biology.

The standard narrative frames scientific founders as brilliant but difficult. Operators are brought in to impose discipline. "Professional management" becomes code for sidelining the people who created the value.

A 2025 analysis of early-stage biotech leadership found that companies which prematurely build out senior teams with big pharma pedigrees often stall. The result is to make the organisation top-heavy with expectations that can't be met at pre-Series A stages, to burn money on salaries when there isn't any to burn. The biotechs that survive are the ones that hire only the people they need to hit the next twelve to eighteen months of milestones.

The lesson isn't that operators are unnecessary. It's that operators without scientific fluency are dangerous when they're making scientific decisions. And in biotech, nearly every strategic decision is, at root, a scientific decision. Platform versus single-asset strategy requires understanding whether the platform has genuine scientific value. Risk assessment requires understanding failure modes that don't appear in financial models. Complexity that the board doesn't understand is not complexity that doesn't exist.

Once scientific voices are marginalised, the feedback loops that catch errors stop functioning. Bad decisions don't get challenged. By the time the consequences become visible, the company has committed resources to a strategy that anyone with scientific fluency could have told them was flawed.

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most non-scientist CEOs don't build formal systems for scientific integration. Doing so requires admitting, in front of your board, your investors, and your scientific team, what you don't know. That feels like weakness. So they wing it. They rely on informal relationships, good intentions, and the assumption that the scientists will speak up if something is wrong.

I've watched that assumption kill companies.

I'm not a bench scientist. But I'm not a finance person who wandered into biotech either. I spent over a decade in pharma, including five years as a commercial strategy lead embedded in R&D at GSK, working alongside scientists daily on development decisions, regulatory strategy, and commercial positioning for pipeline assets. I've since spent many years advising and running biotechs across anti-infectives, gene therapies, cell therapies, oncology, and AI/ML drug discovery. I understand where the translation between science and commercial opportunity breaks down, because I've spent my career working at that interface.

That experience taught me that good intentions aren't enough. So at Santero, I've built a deliberate operating system for scientific integration. Not from a governance textbook, but from having lived the consequences of not having one.

First: unfiltered scientific access. Santero's science was built on fifteen years of structural biology work by Abel Garcia-Pino at ULB in Brussels. Abel isn't an employee; he's the academic founder whose research created everything the company owns. My CSO, Cuong, has a direct line to Abel and his expertise. When a scientific question arises, it reaches the decision-making table in its original form, through scientists who understand the nuance. Not pre-digested by operators who've stripped out the uncertainty.

I've seen "the science is on track" used as a summary when the actual assessment was far more qualified. Every layer of translation between the science and the CEO strips nuance. By the time a concern reaches you as "something to keep an eye on," the urgency the scientist intended has evaporated.

Second: explicit decision rights. Earlier this month, I ran a governance session with my executive team to ensure there was clarity and alignment around decision making driven by our science. We have significant upcoming milestones, and zero margin for execution delays caused by ambiguity about who decides what.

We established a clear framework. The CSO has decision authority over R&D prioritisation, compound selection, and experimental direction. Platform-level strategic decisions are made by the CEO, CSO, and COO together. Abel has an advisory voice on all scientific matters, with a right to be consulted on major pivots, but without a veto. If Abel believes a CSO decision threatens the scientific foundation, he escalates to me. I decide within 48 hours. No lingering debates. One line of direction going forward.

Without explicit decision rights, scientific disagreements become political contests. The loudest voice wins, or the most senior operator overrides the scientist without understanding the consequences. Formalising who owns which decisions protects the scientific voice by giving it structural authority rather than relying on goodwill.

Third: the discipline of knowing the right questions. I cannot evaluate an assay myself. But I've learned to ask: what does the data say? What does the literature show? What's the timeline impact? When I hear confidence from my CSO, I need to distinguish it from hope. When a scientific concern is raised, I need to recognise whether it's being addressed or managed.

The moment when the financial model says "proceed" but your CSO says "I'm not confident in the mechanism" is the moment that defines whether you're governing or gambling. Building enough scientific literacy to recognise that moment is not optional for a biotech CEO. It's the job.

The most dangerous moment for the scientific voice comes during transitions. Founders stepping back is frequently healthy. But too often, "stepping back" becomes "losing influence." CSO becomes "scientific advisor." Scientific advisor becomes someone who attends board meetings as an observer, if at all.

I've seen transitions where the incoming CEO spent more energy managing the founder out than managing the company forward. Soon after, the company had neither the scientific founder's institutional knowledge nor a functioning development programme.

I've also seen boards where the only competent governance voice walked away because they couldn't get straight answers to reasonable questions about how fundraising proceeds were being used to progress the science. The questions were never answered. Eventually the director resigned, taking their investment and their expertise with them.

Watch for these patterns. Exclusion from strategic conversations where you learn about major decisions after they've been made. Reframing of your concerns as "not seeing the bigger picture." Being told to "focus on the science" while operators make strategic calls that depend entirely on scientific judgment. And the quiet one: financial dependency destroying board independence. See my last article for more information on this major risk.

When the people asking the right questions leave or fall silent, only the wrong answers remain.

The science is why you exist. Governance that silences scientific judgment is governance that destroys the asset it's meant to protect.

If you're a scientific founder preparing to step back from operations, protect your voice structurally before you sign anything. Board seat, voting authority, decision rights. Get it in writing.

If you're a non-scientist CEO, this is your responsibility. You don't need to understand the biology at the level your CSO does. You need to build the structures that ensure scientific judgment reaches every strategic decision unfiltered, with the authority to change outcomes when the science demands it. And you need the intellectual honesty to admit what you don't know, because the alternative is pretending, and pretending is how operator capture begins.

Every biotech that fails because scientific judgment was ignored is a medicine that never reached patients who needed it. That outcome is never inevitable. It is always a governance choice.

This is the third article in a six-part series on biotech governance. Next: Platform versus Asset, the board's hardest decision.

I write Beards on Biotech because I've seen what happens when governance fails. If you're navigating these dynamics, I'd like to hear your experience.