From the time she was in her teens, Enith Morillo has faced down challenges and reinvented her life.
As a high school junior in Venezuela, she applied to Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho, a national scholarship program that sent students to study abroad.
She came from humble beginnings and didn’t speak a word of English. Her father, a self-taught technician, had a sixth grade education, and she’d never thought she’d leave home. On the other hand, she was studious and loved math.
“When I was a kid, my dad repaired TVs and VCRs. He would give me a board of electrical components and tell me to solder them,” she said. “As a family business, we were allowed to be there all the time. In high school, I did a project on the first MRI machine in my city and it blew my mind. I always wanted to be an engineer.”
Morillo was one of roughly 250 to win the scholarship in 1990, and it changed her life.
She spent the first lonely year in the United States enrolled at a private school outside of Boston, Cambridge School of Weston, where she learned English and made her way through the college application process. “It was a heart-wrenching experience to be living away from my family and in another country where I couldn’t communicate. However, the promise of a better future always kept me going,” she said.
That determination has been an underpinning to her life story; she was the first person in her family to graduate college. Today, Morillo is the principal consultant of Cadoret Global Inc., a Cumberland company that supports pharmaceutical and biotech companies as they take drugs through clinical trials and on to the commercial market.
Morillo graduated in 1998 from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and biomedical engineering. Soon, however, her life rebooted when a family commitment took her to Syria. Within two weeks of arriving in her new home, she registered for Arabic classes at the University of Damascus, and in the next few years, raised her children, and worked in a pizza restaurant and as a barista.
“I’ve always been fascinated by history, and to learn about people, the language is key,” she said.
Living in that part of the world was great, she says, but moving back to New England and trying to enter the workforce, with a nine-year gap in her engineering career, proved difficult. “I didn’t know where to begin,” Morillo said.
At the time, the Community College of Rhode Island was launching its first biotech program, so she enrolled to update her academic knowledge and put it to work.
It gave her a foot in the door. From there, she landed a job at a local biotech firm, then spent several years in quality assurance at Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. and PharmaLex, companies that service pharmaceutical and other science-related businesses. Eventually, she realized she was more comfortable in a smaller environment where she could wear many hats.
She pivoted yet again, launching Cadoret in 2019. “I wanted to better serve clients as a quality assurance professional, bringing value, partnership and integrity to our work,” she said.
Cadoret Global supports startup, virtual, early-phase and small-size pharmaceutical companies through the arduous process of drug development and clinical trials while navigating regulatory requirements and ensuring overall product quality. The company’s consultants are spread across the U.S., Europe and Asia. The majority of their clients are domestic startups going through clinical trials for the first time, she says.
Much of Cadoret’s business is referral based, conducted on-site or virtually via videoconferencing, and the stakes are high. The vast majority of drugs that go through phase 1 tests fail to make it to market. Clients have been known to call as late as 11 p.m. or on weekends because of unexpected problems, and sometimes it means an unexpected trip to a manufacturer’s facility. “We want clients to trust our expertise, that we’ve been through these drug phases and trials before,” she said.
“I love on-site audits,” she added, “getting on a plane, meeting new people, seeing how compliance is approached by other cultures.”
Sandy Tremblay, Cadoret’s executive administrator, met Morillo through the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program two years ago. She was impressed with the example Morillo sets for minority and young women, that if you work hard enough and are determined, you can accomplish things.
“So much of what you see on TV is ‘Shark Tank,’ but you don’t need to have a product to pitch,” Tremblay said. “Enith coming here not knowing English, putting herself through school, finding a way to make it happen. There’s a message that if you want to make it happen, you’ll do it.”
With days that can stretch from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Morillo is doing precisely that, at work she says she loves.
“I felt I missed out, that my peers had a head start and I had to make up for lost time,” she said. “Although they were difficult years, they have allowed me to get where I am. They gave me the will to persevere.”
