Sheila Mikhail has almost 25 years of biopharmaceutical leadership experience.  She is a serial entrepreneur, an advocate for equitable access to healthcare, and a philanthropist.

She is the co-founder of AskBio and served as Chief Executive Officer until March 2023 and currently serves in the role of Advisor. During her tenure as CEO, she built three GMP manufacturing facilities in Spain, which sell their excess capacity under the trade names Viralgen and TAAV.  With $235m in Series A funding, she built the company to over 350 employees operating in five countries. Under her leadership, AskBio has advanced programs into the clinic for Pompe, Limb Girdle, Heart Failure, Parkinson’s, Multiple System Atrophy, and Huntington’s. In December 2020, Ms. Mikhail led the negotiation of the $4b AskBio acquisition by Bayer AG and, subsequently, grew the company to over 850 employees worldwide.  

Prior to her role at AskBio, she co-founded Bamboo Therapeutics and served as Chief Executive Officer until its acquisition by Pfizer in August 2016 in a deal valued at $827m. Prior to that, she was part of the management team at Chatham Therapeutics which was acquired by Baxter in 2014.

Committed to ensuring that gene therapy treatments are developed for patients suffering from ultra-rare diseases, in 2017, Ms. Mikhail co-founded Columbus Children’s Foundation (CCF). To date, CCF has supported the treatment of 51 children suffering from amino acid decarboxylase deficiency (AADC), a devastating neurological disease with no viable treatment option, at no cost to their families.

In further pursuit of equitable access to healthcare, Ms. Mikhail co-founded Jurata Thin Film, Inc., which has developed a cellulose matrix platform technology for the storage of gene therapies and vaccines at ambient temperatures for extended periods, thereby enabling distribution to locations without adequate cold supply chain infrastructure. Following her diagnosis with bilateral breast cancer, which had not been detected over several years of 3-D (tomosynthesis) mammograms, Ms. Mikhail formed BC-Ruckus to advocate for easier access to supplemental screening for women with dense breasts so everyone’s breast cancer can be found early.

Ms. Mikhail practiced law for more than 15 years. During that time, she founded Life Sciences Law, a boutique law firm which serviced clients such as Bayer, Gilead, GSK, Sanofi and Aventis. Prior to moving to North Carolina in 2000, she practiced law with Ropes and Gray in Boston and was a management consultant with Kearney in Chicago. Recently, Ms. Mikhail was recognized as the Ernst & Young 2021 Overall National Entrepreneur of the Year.

She earned a JD with honors from Northwestern University, a finance MBA with honors from the University of Chicago, and a BS with highest honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.