It is pretty amazing – we have seen many biotech leaders and tech leaders. Both are explosive growth industries with charismatic leaders and they are both rapidly re-shaping peoples’ lives.
However, there is one person (emphasis) who has accomplished both – that person is Martine Rothblatt. She is a CEO of United Therapeutics (Ticker: UTHR). United Therapeutics does not have a large fan base on Wall Street because Wall Street is laser-focused on short-term outcome – Martine continues to invest for the long-term while Wall Street investors keep asking for more short-term ways to increase the stock price. I sat in one meeting where one investor kept pushing them to buy back shares or take on more leverage. She and her executive team kept mentioning that they need to invest for long term.
While she is not as well known as other former tech entrepreneurs, she is one of the most innovative entrepreneurs of 20th and 21st centuries, and I would even think that she could be on Elon Musk level!
She actually is a co-founder of Sirius XM – she saw that the satellite technology would really revolutionize the radio industry. At a later time, her daughter was diagnosed with a rare disease called Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) and this led her to study PAH, pulled together experts in the field, and acquired a pipeline product that was just collecting dust inside GSK. He acquired it for less than $100K and formed United Therapeutics. United Therapeutics now has a $5bn+ enterprise value based on delivering enormous value for PAH patient community. True to her innovative spirit, United Therapeutics continues to push the bar for PAH care and also is actively and heavily investing in organ manufacturing – the problem she is trying to solve is the supply issue – today, there is enormous shortage of organs for patients that need them.
I saw her video on Youtube and had a privilege to meet her and her team in person at JPM healthcare conference and other broker conferences. Her honesty , integrity, vision, respectfulness, attention, detail, and care for her executive team have always impressive. I think we all should take a page from her by learning more about her groundbreaking career path.
Sirius XM DISRUPTS THE US RADIO AND CULTURE
Martine got a taste of satellite through a project during her JD/MBA program at UCLA, and that experience allowed her to land on satellite-related cases when we worked at a law firm in Washington D.C. This was a critical time for communication industry as satellite was completely changing the industry landscape. Working as an attorney at a large law firm, she ended up spending a lot of time defending the entrenched market players from new entrants – she felt that she was blocking innovation and resigned to start a satellite radio, which ended up becoming Sirius XM.
Her motivation for starting satellite is very interesting – it was not to just make money, but she saw it as an opportunity for niche music genre to become available to their listeners. As a highly fragmented market, radio is often regional / city-focused, and as a result, each radio station had to focus on (still do) the most popular music genres. The demand for niche was never enough. She saw that satellite radio can essentially roll up the demand for small niche genres and national interest would be large enough to warrant a separate music station – which would only be possible through satellite technology. Through Martine’s vision and execution, radio industry was completely transformed and culturally, I have no doubt that her work helped preserve many different music genres that may not be popular but are important for our cultural diversity.
UNITED THERAPEUTICS RESCUES PAH PATIENTS AND SEEKS TO SOLVE SUPPLY PROBLEM WITH ORGANS
As a former lawyer and tech entrepreneur, Martine was not familiar with PAH before her daughter was diagnosed with the deadly disease. At the time, PAH had poor prognosis without strong therapeutic option and with very high mortality. As a rare disease, there was not a lot of research, and due to lack of commercial appeal at the time (no orphan drug benefits that we enjoy now), many large cap pharmaceutical companies were not putting a lot of investment dollars. Seeing that the disease with which her daughter had been diagnosed was essentially overlooked, she reached out to GSK to license treprostinil, a compound that was just collecting dust in GSK’s drug cabinet. The rest is history – with a great team that she assembled, she was able to bring the drug to market and has completely transformed PAH patients’ lives.
Brought in with only $100K and royalty license (Martine notes that $100K is the best investment that GSK ever made), treprostinil was initially available through IV (intravenous), but is now available through SC (subcutaneous), oral dose, and inhaled delivery – different types of treprostinil for patients with different severity.
Martine’s passion to improve therapy for PAH and significant investment behind it have won United Therapeutics a strong loyalty from physician community and UTHR is competing very competitively against a pharma behemoth Johnson and Johnson – they are racing each other to further improve the PAH treatment paradigm.
This fierce competition has made PAH market to be an effective duopoly between JNJ and UTHR – it is now very difficult for new entrants to come in and effectively commercialize their products. Arena (ticker: ARNA) tried to enter the market, but they struggled to enroll patients into their clinical trial program, and licensed out its high value product to Arena – post-licensing agreement, it is said that clinical trial enrollment accelerated. Recently, Acceleron (XLRN) showed great data with sotatercept, but the trial will need a very large number of enrolled patients and it will be difficult to enter market until 2023 or 2024 timeframe.
UTHR is now transforming into an innovative platform that is moving onto Martine’s next vision – that is organ manufacturing. Many people are living longer and are accumulating greater risks that may need organ transplant – as a result, organ demand is rising sharply, but supply remains fixed / limited. UTHR is focused on improving donated organ conditions with long-term goal of manufacturing organs. UTHR now has partnership with Mayo clinic and I am really excited what UTHR and Mayo can do for these patients.
MARTINE’S NEXT GRAND VISION
Martine’s mind is also on continuous living – transplanting the information within our brains into a chip-based memories. This could permanently preserve one’s mind. This vision started with a dream that she wants to be with her loving family forever and I am also very excited about the prospect of what can be done. Sometimes, it is not just the innovation itself, but also associated inventions that allowed the innovation that really pushes the market forward.
I shared an interview below – just 20 minutes long, but it is absolutely fascinating. Hope you take a look!
Who is your favorite biotech / tech entrepreneur? Please suggest below so I can learn about their lives too!
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