Hector Alila, D.V.M., Ph.D.
President & Founder

Dr. Alila, a graduate of Cornell University, is a biopharmaceutical industry veteran. He brings over 20 years of management, drug development and research experience in ‘big pharma’ and biotech industry to Esperance.   He served as Senior Vice President of Drug Development at Protalex, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company based in Pennsylvania, where he led the development of a drug currently in clinical trials for treatment of autoimmune diseases. He was Vice President of Product Development at Cell Pathways, Inc, (later acquired by OSI Pharmaceuticals) based in Pennsylvania, a cancer drug discovery and development company, where he was responsible for the development of two new cancer drugs.  Prior to that he was the Director of Biology/pharmacology at GeneMedicine, Inc., (merged with Megabios to become Valentis Inc, in Burlingame, California) a Gene Therapy company in The Woodlands, Texas, where he led the research and development of gene medicines to treat cancer, inflammation, cardiovascular diseases and spinal cord injury.  He also held several research, development and management positions at SmithKline (now GlaxoSmithKline) in Pennsylvania.  He obtained his Ph.D. degree in physiology and endocrinology (with a minor in immunology) and was also a Senior Research Fellow at Cornell.  Dr. Alila has published several scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and holds several patents.

For the last decade Dr. Leuschner’s research has focused on the development of anti-cancer drugs and imaging systems for non-invasive cancer detection in applications for prostate, breast, and ovarian cancers as Assistant Professor in the Department of Reproductive Biotechnology at Pennington Biomedical Research Center (PBRC) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  She also served as an Instructor in the Department of Diet and Heart Disease at the Pennington Biomedical Center.  Dr. Leuschner obtained her doctorate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Hannover, Germany with postdoctoral training I the Department of Technical Microbiology of Hamburg University, Germany.  She has published two book chapters, over 40 peer reviewed articles and holds several patents.  Dr. Leuschner is the recipient of the Nano50 2006 Technology Award.