“Biotech isn’t an industry for the faint of heart,” says Peter Crane, CEO and co-founder of Entelo Bio.
It’s a sentiment that runs through his story – from his early days as a chemical biologist, to years spent building and backing startups, to founding Entelo in 2023.
This year, Entelo earned a place on our Brain Belt 50 report, recognised among the region’s most innovative and exciting startups. For Peter, that recognition isn’t about being flashy. It’s about conviction: building with grit, bravery, and an acute awareness that following the playbooks of the past two decades is no longer enough.
In this interview, Peter shares why biotech demands innovation at every level, from defining platform-disease fit to scaling sustainably and ultimately delivering for patients.
Peter, congratulations on your feature in the Brain Belt 50 report! For those unfamiliar, can you give a brief overview of Entelo’s mission?
Entelo was founded by my co-founders and me out of frustration with current omics technologies. Genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics have advanced hugely in the last five or six years. However, they still capture limited information about what’s happening inside cells – mostly gene expression, whether a gene is ‘on’ or ‘off.’
We set out to solve that by developing new approaches that deliver much richer, high-density insights at the cellular level. Today, we’re deploying those capabilities as a precision medicine company – decoding complex biology, discovering new targets and biomarkers, de-risking clinical trials, and ultimately tackling some of the most devastating diseases.
Tell us about your own journey. What pivotal moments shaped your path into biotech?
I trained as a wet lab chemical biologist, working in glycobiology and protein bioconjugation. Early on, I realised I wanted to create impact beyond academic papers, developing products that could help thousands of patients.
That led me into biotech investing and company-building very early in my career. I worked across therapeutics, life science tools, and platforms, often at the intersection of biology and computation. I’ve been involved on both the company and VC side – biomanufacturing, lab automation, proteomics, therapeutics – before co-founding Entelo in early 2023.
For me, the journey was from basic science to computational approaches, and ultimately to building companies that can have a real-world impact.
Entelo is rooted in Oxford but operates within the broader Brain Belt ecosystem. What advantages has that brought?
Although I completed my own PhD at Oxford, Entelo was actually spun out of my co-founder’s years of Oxford research. The Brain Belt provides us with access to a density of talent that you’d only otherwise find in places like Kendall Square or South San Francisco.
Beyond talent, there’s a community of investors, partners, service providers, and international connections. And crucially, we’re close to leading universities – Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL, King’s, Queen Mary. That combination of talent, infrastructure, and academic collaboration makes it the best place in the UK to build a biotech company.
And how does being split across Oxford and London shape your approach to building teams?
Each location has its strengths. Oxford is great for specific disease areas, wet lab work, and links to the academic community. London, as our HQ, is ideal for computational and machine learning talent, and for attracting people from Oxford, Cambridge, and London into a central hub.
Being spread across both gives us access to all three nodes of the Brain Belt within an hour of one of our offices. For us, it’s essential.
For the last decade, the playbook was: build a platform, start narrow with a rare disease, get early clinical proof-of-concept, and then expand. That’s shifting.
Looking ahead, how do you see Entelo’s work impacting patients and the broader biotech landscape in the next 5–10 years?
Biotech is at a junction right now. For the last decade, the playbook was: build a platform, start narrow with a rare disease, get early clinical proof-of-concept, and then expand. That’s shifting.
Pharma is realising big indications matter, and that’s where we’re leaning in – using our new window on biology to tackle larger, more complex diseases. In 10 years, I’d like us to be both a precision medicine enabler (helping trials run better, discovering targets and biomarkers) and a company with its own advanced clinical pipeline or products.
That doesn’t mean everything developed in-house; some will be co-developed or licensed. The point is to get to products in the right way, de-risking development with our technology.
What’s been the biggest challenge in translating your science into real-world applications?
Defining platform-disease fit. With a platform company, it’s easy to spread too thin – across multiple diseases, business models, and partnerships – without going deep enough.
We spent a long time speaking with over a hundred patients and clinicians to really understand how our platform could de-risk development and create value. It’s a challenging but crucial exercise. It doesn’t require more money, just time, discipline, and staying lean until you know where you’ll have the most impact.
I’ve seen a lot of premature scaling without clarity. I’ve seen a poor platform-disease fit. I’ve seen a lot of mistakes – and avoiding all of that was key for us.
What leadership qualities matter most for biotech CEOs today?
Two qualities really matter right now: grit and bravery.
Look, it’s tough. You’ve got to hang in there, keep fighting, turn up every day, and put your best foot forward. Biotech is not for the faint of heart. Whether it’s flipping the card on a clinical trial or raising money, it’s a complex and hard industry.
Being brave and having grit, those are what keep you in the game – and that ultimately comes from being rooted in patient need. If you’ve done the work with clinicians and patients from the beginning, you have a north star to guide you, even when things get tough.
If your company’s whole model is based around doing the same old thing people have done for 20 years, I don’t think you deserve to win.
What advice would you give other founders about where to focus right now?
It depends on the stage, but broadly: be agile, focus on financing and business development, and create optionality. As CEO, you need to give yourself enough time for fundraising, partnerships, and external opportunities – while giving your technical team stability to focus deeply on the science.
This market rewards creativity in business models and financing strategies. If your company’s whole model is based around doing the same old thing people have done for 20 years, I don’t think you deserve to win. Because this is an industry where you haveto innovate. I’ve never been more bullish on the pharmaceutical and biotech industries than I am today.
Who have been the key influences on your career?
There hasn’t been one single mentor. It’s been a journey – entrepreneurial experiences during my PhD, learning the ropes at startups, then venture capital. Each stage brought exposure to brilliant people with different perspectives: markets, operations, clinical development, platform building.
That mix gave me the confidence to start Entelo without falling into the common traps. And, of course, you continue to learn. Honestly, I’ve learned more as a CEO in the last two years than at any point before.
Finally, how do you balance the demands of leadership with your own curiosity and passion for science?
For me, it’s reading. I’ve always loved reading scientific literature, and I still make time for it daily – not just in our field, but across broader areas of science. It keeps me curious and often sparks ideas that cross-pollinate.
Sometimes biotech news can be quite acidic – shutdowns, M&A, licensing deals. But I find much more inspiration in blue-sky research and top-tier journals. Staying close to the science is what keeps the passion alive.
Peter and Entelo Bio were recently spotlighted in our Brain Belt 50 report, featuring the most innovative and exciting startups across the UK’s Brain Belt region.
