Most of today’s therapies are focused on relieving symptoms. With her Research Triangle, North Carolina-based company, AskBio, Sheila Mikhail wants to treat—and maybe even cure--diseases at the molecular level. Scientists at the company start with the shell of a non-pathogenic virus that’s capable of penetrating human cells, then remove its harmful DNA and replace it with genetic material that can create proteins the defective genes couldn’t. The treatment is injected into the patient’s body with the hopes of mitigating genetic disease such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy.

Mikhail co-founded AskBio in 2001, long before gene therapy was in vogue in the medical world--so much so that the entrepreneur says she was once booed off a stage for speaking about it. “They thought I was giving false hope, she says. They thought it was science fiction. Today, AskBio has treatments for heart disease, Pompe disease, Huntington’s disease, and Duchenne muscular dystrophy underway or set to begin. It has secured $235 million in funding, earned more than 500 patents, and has 185 employees spread across offices in Scotland, Spain and France.

For Mikhail, success has been about remaining dedicated--even if being early made that extra challenging. “Find the thing that you’re so passionate about that you won’t care about the haters,” she says. “Be tenacious about it, passionate, and persistent no matter what.” – Kevin J. Ryan

In Michigan, where the current minimum wage is $9.65 an hour, Carla Walker-Miller took a stand in 2018 when she began hiring workers at a minimum of $15 an hour. She didn’t stop there: She adopted a policy where people with criminal records are still fairly considered for employment. “I believe in modeling decisions that put the team first,” says Walker-Miller. “That way, everyone from the receptionist to the security guard to your customer experience manager knows that you’re invested in them, and they’ll put that same investment in you and your company.”

Walker-Miller Energy Services was initially founded in 2000 to be an energy product supplier, but grew to focus on energy efficiency for residential and commercial clients after Michigan passed 2009 legislation requiring better efficiency in energy use. Walker-Miller’s company landed on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies for five of the years between 2007 and 2016. – Anna Meyer

When Elisabete Miranda immigrated to the United States from Brazil in 1994, she learned how a life's experience can get lost in translation. In Brazil, she'd been a respected serial entrepreneur and vice president of her local chamber of commerce. In the U.S., she felt like one more Latin American woman who didn't speak the language. "When you move to another country, it's like you become a stupid person," she says with a laugh, recalling her first days in the States. "You have to suck it up and do what you need to do."

What Miranda needed to do, she believed, wasn't just to learn English, but also to turn translation into a business. She teamed up with her sister-in-law, Edna Ditaranto, a professional translator, who at the time was doing freelance work translating Portuguese for American companies. Miranda started out at the company first serving as a proofreader for Ditaranto's work, then as her bookkeeper--and eventually, as Miranda applied more of her hard-won business acumen to her in-law's business, as the little company's CEO.

"As her bookkeeper, I knew she didn't have money to pay me," says Miranda. "I thought, I better make this company grow somehow so I can get paid!"

Today the company, CQ Fluency, focuses on health care--for instance, translating treatment plans and other documents aimed at non-English-speaking patients for customers that include life science companies and hospitals.

Now, as CQ Fluency oversees projects in 150 languages, Miranda's clients understand her, loud and clear. Her advice for other entrepreneurs: "To stand out, you have to specialize," she says. "Being one more mediocrity doesn't help anyone." –Burt Helm

It’s been a tough couple of months for the hospitality industry. But when Vanessa Ogle of Enseo--a company known for being the first to integrate Netflix into hotel rooms--saw her clients’ revenue tank due the coronavirus, she saw how technology could help. Enseo introduced seven new products, and secured 10 new patents (Enseo is the lead inventor on a total of 40 U.S. patents), to help clients reopen and attract consumers. These include a virtual front desk agent, a temperature scanner, and an ultraviolet cleaning cart. “The most difficult thing about radical change is breaking inertia,” she says. “To go to an entire team of engineers and say, ‘Thanks for all the hard work on the products you’ve been building. I want you to drop everything and go do this new set of products that we’ve never done before,’” was an intense effort. Ogle likens the process of converting ideas to reality to a reduction in cooking, where you concentrate a flavor by applying heat--and the coronavirus certainly provided the pressure. –Gabrielle Bienasz