Biotech CEO returns to UI roots in aim to revolutionize health care

IOWA CITY — During her trek to base camp on Mount Everest last year, Iowa native Leslie Williams — of course — was taken by the grandeur of the peaks that engulfed her.

But it was the people — the Napelese villagers, Sherpas, guides and fellow biotech executives on her team — who made the experience life-changing.

“You become very close to those that you’re trekking with,” Williams said. “But also, in the villages, you realize how little you need to be happy. People get so caught up with things that shouldn't matter. And you have to make sure that you pause and reflect on that on a regular basis.”

Williams, at the time, was taking a well-deserved pause from decades of professional exploration, discovery, development and entrepreneurial highs and lows.

She was in need of a reset — coming off the reverse merger of the first company she founded a decade earlier in 2010: ImmusanT Inc., which aimed to develop immunotherapies for autoimmune diseases but had completed five clinical trials before eventually failing to meet its primary endpoint.

While “devastated” by the end of ImmusanT, the failure was just another dip on Williams’ professional roller coaster of unexpected ends propelling massive successes. And it ushered in another new ascent — both literally in Nepal and metaphorically at the University of Iowa, where Williams started her academic pursuits in the late 1970s.

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'This is fun’

As the daughter of an educator and of a technician who had dreamed of attending the UI College of Engineering but never did, Williams — the youngest of three from Gowrie — early on had a passion for discovery, service and science.

“I only looked at one school,” Williams, now 62, said about the UI. “And that was the school I looked at because I was looking for a top nursing school. I didn't think of anything else. I really was focused on patients and impacting patients and loved science.”

She graduated with honors in 1982 and began working as a registered nurse in a UI Hospitals and Clinics operating room before relocating to North Carolina’s Duke Medical Center, where she worked as a nurse and tacked on a second job — making her entree into research and the opportunities it held.

“That's when I got exposed to the business side of medicine,” Williams said. “And I started thinking, there's more to it. I can do this in a bigger way. This is interesting. This is fun.”

And so when Glaxo Inc. offered her a job as a sales representative, she said yes.

“I moved to Virginia for Glaxo, and I did very well. But I was always itching to go back to school,” she said. “And the physicians that I ended up meeting said, ‘You really need to go to med school.’”

Williams listened, left Glaxo and started studying for the Medical College Admission Test — while continuing to work nights as a nurse. Although she took the test, passed it and got into medical school, Williams also had received a job offer from Merck & Company — and her internal scales began to tip.

“I was kind of calculating in my head, four years of med school, four years of residency, then fellowship,” she said. “I don't do anything halfway. I’m passionate about what I do, no matter what it is, and I put my everything into it. And so I started doing some soul searching and made a decision.”

Williams picked the business track — although holding on to her medical roots in the brand of business she’d pursue — and moved to St. Louis for Merck, a global health care company that’s produced medicines, vaccines and therapies, among other things.

She met her husband and got her master of business administration from Washington University, where she would initiate, build and sell her first technology.

"I teamed up with mathematicians and an anesthesiologist, and we came up with a software tool that we ended up selling to Hewlett-Packard.”

The tool was to be incorporated into cardiac monitors.

“That was when I really got my itch for, hey, I really like building something that solves a significant unmet need,” Williams said.

Enter her next project, working with a founding team on a treatment for pulmonary hypertension in newborns. It involved a medicinal gas that dilated the vascular system in the heart of babies who breathed in their own newborn stool.

Before her team’s discovery, the babies either would die or be placed on an oxygenator.

“These were perfectly normal babies that just aspirated meconium,” she said.

Work on that discovery and building an associated company — INO Therapeutics Inc. — began in 1996 and two years later, the company won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for “discovery that nitric oxide is a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system.”

Williams as director of sales and marketing for INO helped the company amass $40 million in first-year sales in 2000, ballooning two years later to $96 million in U.S. sales in 2002 and then $115 million in 2003. After spending years lobbying members of Congress and presenting to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on the technology’s import, INO was acquired in 2007 for $670 million and then sold again in 2015 for $2.3 billion.

Long before those acquisitions, though, Williams had moved on to her next venture — as she was pursued by another company: Ventaira Pharmaceuticals Inc., a pharmaceutical company that developed pulmonary-drug technology enabling more efficient delivery of medication to and through the lungs.

Although recruited to be head of business development, Williams’ leadership prowess immediately propelled her to her first presidential post.

“Within three months, I became chief operating officer,” she said. “And within six months I was CEO.”

Williams with Ventaira raised $18.5 million in venture capital, orchestrated a turnaround and negotiated a merger and acquisition — giving the company a “soft landing.”

It was at that point — in 2010 — that Williams found her way to ImmusanT, where she funneled her passion for team building, patient care and biomedical science into trying to discover a new way of helping people with autoimmune diseases.

UI collaboration

Although that endeavor came to an abrupt and challenging end in 2019, Williams — then an executive board member with the UI College of Pharmacy — recently had connected with UI researcher Chris Ahern.

Having read Ahern’s research paper involving tRNA — an RNA molecule key in protein synthesis — Williams began chatting with him about his discoveries and made it to Iowa City in 2020, just before the arrival of COVID-19 grounded flights.

On Feb. 3, 2020, the two met over dinner at One Twenty Six in Iowa City.

“I told him at dinner, ‘This can be a company,’” Williams said. “I was hooked.”

The next day she visited his lab, and the two officially launched hC Bioscience Inc. one year later in February 2021.

“In 2020, I was also evaluating other CEO opportunities and had to decide if I wanted to start another company or lead a company already established,” Williams said. “I love revolutionary ideas, not evolutionary, and no one was working on tRNA for therapeutic applications.”

As founder, chief executive, president and director of the company, Williams — now based in Boston — is building the business from the ground up, with aspirations of developing tRNA therapeutics for cancer and rare genetic disease.

“I was hooked by the potential impact the science could have to address diseases where there are suboptimal or no treatment options,” she said.

Key to that work, as she’s found in all her endeavors, is the team — the people “you’re trekking with.”

“I've got a team of people here that are translating the technology that came out of Chris's lab,” said Williams, who also continues to surround herself with young scientists and fellow female CEOs in a “biotech sisterhood.”

The idea, she said, is to remove some of the hurdles she had to clear on her way up for those coming behind her.

“Our goal is to support other women and provide that safe environment to bounce ideas off,” she said. “Not only as women CEOs, but bringing up that next generation.”

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Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com