The 10 people transforming healthcare, from companies like Moderna, Humana, and Lexeo Therapeutics

After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, Caitlin Bernard shot to the center of the national debate on abortion rights when she was interviewed by the Indianapolis Star about performing an abortion for a 10-year-old rape victim.

In June 2013, as she was working as a research associate at Stanford University, Elisabeth Bik noticed that someone had plagiarized some of her work in a book chapter. Since then, Bik has made a career out of exposing doctored images and other information manipulation in scientific information.

"I feel I can be the voice of a lot of people without power to raise these concerns because I don't really care if a person is the dean of a big university or the editor in chief of a journal," she told Insider.

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In 2019, Demetre Daskalakis was the incident commander for a major measles outbreak in New York City, and when COVID-19 came along he became head of the vaccine task force at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now he's the deputy director of President Joe Biden's national monkeypox response, working to end the US's monkeypox outbreak.

"My job is to put myself out of a job," Daskalakis told Insider. "So we'll see how that goes."

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Over the past 50 years, Feilding has helped to design and fund funded study after study through Beckley Foundation to better understand how psychedelic compounds work in the brain and how they can be used as medicines.

"I have dedicated my life to researching the underlying mechanisms behind the action of psychedelics so that one can harness their full potential to enhance health and well-being," Fielding told Insider.

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Yvonne Greenstreet leads Alnylam Pharmaceuticals has built itself into a biotech powerhouse by creating a new class of medicines called RNA interference, or RNAi, drugs.

"There's no reason in my mind we can't go all the way and become a big pharma, and then have the broad impact on global health that I would like to see us deliver," Greenstreet told Insider.

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Bruce Broussard took the helm of Humana about a decade ago when it was still a traditional health-insurance company. In the years since, he's transformed Humana, based in Louisville, Kentucky, into an integrated healthcare giant.

"The more we're able to lower preventable events such as emergency-room visits and admissions to hospitals, and we can continue to ensure people are stabilized in their chronic conditions, the more we save. The more we save, the more we can invest in benefits, and the more we invest in benefits, the more we're able to offer them much more affordable plans," Broussard said.

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After the suicide of Alabama transgender teen Leelah Alcorn in 2014, whose note Morissa Ladinsky described as "a call to action," Ladinsky cofounded the Multidisciplinary Gender Team at the University of Alabama, the only gender-focused clinic for youth in the state. She now co-leads the team.

The state of Alabama has banned gender-affirming care for minors, though a preliminary injunction to stop its enforcement was later granted. Ladinsky continues to provide this lifesaving care and keep educating people about why it's so important.

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By high school, Melissa Moore became a published researcher. Now she's a chief scientific officer of the biotech Moderna, which developed a vaccine to protect against COVID-19 in record time. Moore says she got "hooked" on the thrill of discovering even the tiniest truths.

"For that moment, you're the only person in the world that knows that thing, and it's always been true," Moore said.

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After pioneering satellite radio and developing a cure for her daughter's disease, Martine Rothblatt is pursuing another radical idea: creating an endless supply of organs for transplants. Rothblatt's team has led studies involving transplanting genetically edited pig organs into humans.

"At the end of this century, people will be astonished that just because their kidney or their lung or their heart gave out, it's game over," Rothblatt said in 2019.

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At Lexeo, R. Nolan Townsend is focused on developing gene therapies that could be used to treat heart and brain diseases. Notably, it has a program focused on slowing or stopping Alzheimer's disease with a single treatment.

A genetic-medicines revolution is occurring, Townsend said, adding, "I'm just excited to be a part of that revolution."

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