For this year’s Coastal Entrepreneur of the Year, the journey started, as many entrepreneurial journeys do, with an important question.

“How do we make sure life-saving therapies get to the people who need them without delay, without compromise?”

Frontier Scientific Solutions, the 2025 Coastal Entrepreneur of the Year, wanted to come up with an answer.

“That one question sparked a mission that spans time zones, temperature zones and regulatory zones most of us didn't know existed. They're not building an app, they're building an infrastructure, a 530,000-square-foot facility right here in Wilmington and another at an international airport in Ireland,” said Morris Nguyen, co-founder and CEO of AI health care company Predicate Healthcare Performance Group (HPG), last year’s Coastal Entrepreneur of the Year. 

Nguyen made the remarks as he bestowed the Coastal Entrepreneur of the Year award Wednesday night upon Frontier Scientific Solutions during the Coastal Entrepreneur Awards (CEA) celebration held at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

The Coastal Entrepreneur of the Year is awarded a wooden surfboard engraved with each year’s winner, which Frontier Scientific Solutions CEO Steve Uebele accepted during Wednesday's ceremony.

Uebele's company, a temperature-controlled storage and transportation firm serving the life sciences industry, in November 2024 announced plans to develop state-of-the-art facilities at Wilmington International Airport and Shannon Airport in County Clare, Ireland.

The cGMP (Current Good Manufacturing Practices) projects, including the more than 500,000-square-foot facility at ILM’s business park and an initial 70,000-square-foot facility at Shannon Airport, are supported by a $1.5 billion commitment from real estate firm GID, according to a November story by the Business Journal.

Uebele said building Frontier Scientific Solutions required believing in the mission.

“We went through so many hard times to try to figure this out. This team came together and never wavered ... We stuck to the mission. Purpose is what it takes. If you don't have purpose, you just don't have that mission, and everybody in this organization and our company has so much purpose,” he told the CEA audience Wednesday.

In addition to Coastal Entrepreneur of the Year, the CEA celebration at UNCW’s Burney Center honored 11 category winners, including Frontier Scientific Solutions in the biotech category. The awards are a collaboration between the Greater Wilmington Business Journal and UNCW’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The following are all of this year's category winners with links to stories about them: 

• Biotech: Frontier Scientific Solutions
• Biotech: Sandbar Oyster Co.
• Emerging Company: Floortress
• Emerging Company: Synaptigen
• Manufacturing + Distribution: Infinite Structures
• Minority/Woman-Owned Business: Maritime Maids
• Nonprofit: Welcome Home Angel
• Professional Services: Capone & Associates
• Retail + Hospitality: Salt & Charm
• Technology: Boreas Monitoring Solutions
• Technology: Lumos Technologies Inc.