Sheila Award Letter Alison Arter Final

Alison Arter
7900 Orange Grove Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27516

April 9, 2021

N.C. Awards Committee
North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources
109 East Jones Street, Suite 315
Raleigh, North Carolina 27601

Re: North Carolina Award Nomination in the Public Service Category on Behalf of Sheila A. Mikhail, Chief Executive Officer, Asklepios BioPharmaceutical, Inc.

Dear North Carolina Awards Committee,

It is a privilege to nominate Ms. Sheila Mikhail for consideration to receive the State’s highest civilian award for her public service contributions to North Carolina.

I have known Sheila for almost 20 years. We have worked together in various capacities and across several different companies, including Bayer Biologicals, BlueBird BioSciences, Inc., Inspiration BioPharmaceutical, Inc., as well as Asklepios BioPharmaceutical, Inc. Her various contributions to the advancement of technologies developed at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, as well as the economic impact of the creation of thousands of jobs that resulted from her various roles, are too numerous for me to list here.

She has previously received recognition for her contributions throughout the years, including the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs as recognized by Goldman Sachs, the Inc. Female Founders 100 as recognized by Inc. Magazine, the Springboard Northstar award, Power Player (Top 50 Most Influential Persons in NC), the NC Business Leader Magazine and the Leaders in Diversity Award and the Women in Business Award by the Triangle Business Journal. She is certainly deserving of the North Carolina award for the specific benefits to North Carolina which have, and will continue to flow from her work with Asklepios BioPharmaceutical, Inc. (AskBio).

While North Carolina has made many advancements in the biotechnology space, our region has also experienced a number of big pharma setbacks in the past decades. Notably, both Bayer and GSK have moved many jobs out of the Research Triangle Area. Thanks to the tireless and focused work of Ms. Mikhail, big pharma has returned with major investments and endorsements as a direct result of her accomplishments.

Under Ms. Mikhail’s leadership as Chief Executive Officer, the AskBio spinout, Bamboo Therapeutics, Inc., was acquired by Pfizer, Inc. in 2016 in a transaction valued up to $645 million. As a direct result of that acquisition, Pfizer invested half a billion dollars in its Sanford manufacturing facility. There they will now manufacture gene therapy candidates, and this expansion is generating and is expected to continue to generate hundreds of high-paying jobs for North Carolinians.

And just the end of last year, AskBio itself was acquired by Bayer HealthCare, LLC in a high-profile transaction that has been valued as high as $4 billion. This is the THIRD LARGEST acquisition of a North Carolina-based biotech company, after Valeant and Quintiles. Importantly, as Bayer has made clear in its subsequent announcements, the AskBio assets constitute an integral part of Bayer’s pathway to new potentially life-saving drug candidates. Bayer’s head of Pharmaceuticals Business Development and Licensing even went so far as to describe AskBio as an “IND machine” in reference to Investigational New Drug applications, which are the first step in human clinical trials in the U.S. But the best news of all is that Ms. Mikhail deliberately structured the deal to keep AskBio in the Triangle, allowing the start-up to continue its expanding footprint in our State and retain its local employees.

This acquisition, and the many economic benefits that will flow to North Carolina as a result of it, has been made possible by the impressive intellectual property portfolio that AskBio has acquired in the past few years, comprised of hundreds of patents in addition to those developed at UNC. This portfolio will generate substantial value for our local universities. Further, staffing the growing company will bring a concentration of diverse skilled talent for hundreds of jobs, and generate payroll tax growth well before revenue. Finally, the eyes of the biotechnology world will continue to focus on North Carolina, and the reputation and profile of our State is elevated by Ms. Mikhail’s and her colleagues’ efforts over the past two decades. Others may have brought innovative science to the table, but it is Ms. Mikhail alone who deserves the credit for translating scientific achievement into a commercially viable reality.

If one follows the headlines from 2016 until now, one is astonished at the seemingly boundless energy by which Sheila transformed AskBio from a university startup to the world’s premier gene therapy company. The successive acquisitions of Duke startup Actus Therapeutics, the French company Brainvectis, and the Scottish Company Synpromics, as well as countless joint ventures and collaborations, as well as the acquisition of Lion Therapeutics, NanoCor Therapeutics, Brain Neurotherapy Bio, and Viralgen VectorCore, have all brought IP and international structure. Securing the $235 million investment by top-10 private equity firm TPG (the largest one-round financing by a North Carolina life sciences company ever) made many of these acquisitions possible. All to be capped finally by the acquisition by Bayer of the gene therapy empire that Ms. Mikhail built.

Without the perseverance and business and legal acumen of Sheila Mikhail, North Carolina would, at this moment, occupy a much smaller space in the gene therapy and biotechnology landscape. The State owes her a debt of gratitude, for which I wholeheartedly nominate her for the North Carolina Award.

Respectfully Submitted,

/ Alison Arter /
Chief Commercial Officer
Hillhurst Biopharmaceuticals, Inc.