Why Santero? Why Now?

A few months before I joined Santero, Cédric Govaerts, the company's founder, attended a conference where a prominent VC gave an impassioned speech about investing early in genuine unmet medical need. About backing science that could transform patient lives. About the moral imperative to fund what matters.

Cédric approached him afterwards. "We do infectious disease," he said.

The VC's face changed. He looked at his feet. "Yeah, that's a hard one."

He said no.

That story captures something the industry doesn't talk about honestly: there's a profound contradiction between the missions we claim and the capital we deploy.

Let me be direct about what Santero does: we're developing treatments for bacterial infections that don't respond to existing antibiotics.

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the WHO's top ten global health threats. By 2050, AMR could kill 10 million people annually, more than cancer. Patients cycle through treatments without resolution. Healthcare systems spend billions on therapies that fail. And unlike oncology or rare disease, where capital flows freely toward unmet need, infectious disease makes most investors instinctively delete the email.

The sector has produced spectacular failures: bankruptcies, Chapter 11 restructurings, assets that never found commercial homes despite FDA approval. Smart money learned to avoid the space.

I chose it anyway.

The VC in Cédric's story wasn't a hypocrite. He genuinely believed what he'd said on stage. But his investment mandate, his LP expectations, his fund structure: none of it allowed him to act on his beliefs. The system produces a gap between stated values and actual capital allocation.

Most biotech CEOs navigate around this gap. They choose therapeutic areas where capital flows easily. They position their science to match investor preferences rather than patient needs.

I understand that choice. It's rational. But it's not the only choice.

I believe biotech should solve the hardest problems, not just the most fundable ones.

That conviction has shaped my career. I left a lucrative advisory practice when a small biotech client asked me to join them as Corporate Development Director. That was Celixir, and it meant stepping from advisor to operator for the first time: fundraising, licensing negotiations, board dynamics I'd only observed from outside. At UTILITY, I stepped for the first time into the CEO and co-founder seat, building a company on a LEO Pharma spinout, securing FDA QIDP and Fast Track designation. At Sutura, I took on gene therapy, raising an £11M Series A for a modality I'd never worked with before. Each step meant taking on challenges I hadn't yet proven I could handle.

Santero fits that pattern. The science addresses something fundamental about why bacterial infections fail to clear, even when the antibiotic should work. The mechanism is conserved across all bacteria but absent in mammalian cells. The founders spent fifteen years building the academic foundation before spinning out the company. That's not common. Most university spinouts race to commercialise something half-baked. This was the opposite: rigorous science waiting for the right commercial strategy.

The challenge isn't the biology. The biology is real. The challenge is finding investors who see what others miss. Who understand that difficulty creates opportunity. Who recognise that the categories everyone avoids are precisely where genuine value gets created.

I've seen good science fail when governance fails. So I looked at Santero's board structure before I looked at the data.

What I found was unusual enough that it shaped my decision to join.

The co-founder, Cédric, sits on the board, with his co-founder Abel providing deep scientific expertise at Cédric’s side. They are not figureheads, but active participants in strategic decisions. Cédric stepped back from the CEO role because he understood what the company needed for its next phase. That kind of self-awareness is rare. Founders who can distinguish between their interests and the company's interests create space for governance to work. The rest of the board is a robust mix of independent directors with deep domain expertise, and investors that truly care about the science and the business.

The executive team dynamics are healthy. A COO who executes without drama. A CSO with deep domain expertise and genuine intellectual humility. A Chief of Staff with the empathy and attention to detail that balances our focus on progress. Founders who stepped back gracefully to let professional management take the wheel while remaining engaged on the science.

I've been part of boards and executive teams that weren't structured this way. I've watched governance failures cascade into strategic failures into scientific failures into companies that couldn't complete their mission. When I had the opportunity to join a company where the board was designed to work, I took it.

Three months in, a few observations for founders evaluating their own opportunities:

The positioning challenge is the opportunity. If the path were obvious, someone else would have captured the value already. The difficulty is what creates the upside. When investors say "that's a hard one," they're telling you where the real value lives.

Mission resonates more than you expect. Cedric was right about something: people want to help. Even investors who can't fund you often want to support the mission in other ways. The greater purpose opens doors, even when it doesn't immediately open chequebooks.

Check the governance, not just the cap table. How does the board actually function? Who has power? How are decisions made when people disagree? These questions matter more than valuation.

People ask why I took this role after years of comfortable advisory work.

First: I missed the arena. Advising is satisfying in its way. You solve interesting problems, then go home. But you never feel the weight of the decision. You never experience the gap between strategy and execution, where the real learning happens.

Second: I wanted to prove something to myself. That it's possible to build a biotech career around solving hard problems rather than chasing easy capital. That the gap between what we say and what we fund can be closed, one company at a time.

Santero gave me the chance to step back into that gap with science worth fighting for, a team worth fighting alongside, and a mission that matters beyond the financial returns.

Whether it works out is yet to be determined. That's the nature of early-stage biotech. But the decision to try? That one I'm confident in.

Every medicine that reaches a patient who needs it started with someone choosing the hard path.

Mark