Doctors Said Her Daughter Had 3 Months To Live, So She Created The Cure For An ‘Incurable’ Disease

Martine Rothblatt is a self-made female millionaire. She founded a company that eventually became Siruis XM, as well as several others. Before this venture, she was a lawyer who specialized in space law.

Back in the 1990s, she’d taken Sirius public and done quite well for herself. She considered retiring, but before she could, her daughter, Jenesis, was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension, a fatal condition at that time.

With this disease, the arteries that carry blood from your heart to your lungs shrink, making the heart work harder to pump blood to the lungs. Eventually, they can give out from the strain of the extra effort.

There were a few options for treatment, but medication needed to be continuously pumped using a special portable device, which is stressful and inconvenient for the patient. Martine was devastated for Jenesis, but her wife pointed out that they’d weathered hard times before.

Today, Martine and her partner Bina have been together for three decades. They remained a couple through Martine’s transition and had four children together. They’ve led an exciting life, and Bina was a constant source of inspiration. She pushed Martine to save their little girl.

“I felt like my only purpose in life now was not to help move to the stars with satellites and stuff like that. It was to save Jenesis. So I just stopped everything I was doing,” Martine said. Jenesis would faint continually when she was a preteen, spending her life in the hospital.

Martine read journals and textbooks, trying to find anything that might save Jenesis. Her goal was to find something that could be turned into a pill that would be easy for patients to take. She put $3 million into creating a research organization, United Therapeutics, for pulmonary arterial hypertension.

During her research, she identified a molecule that looked promising for Jenesis. United Therapies bought the drug from the pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline. Her company would go public a few years later in 1999.

And, in 2009, they received FDA approval for their drug, Orenitram, “Martine Ro,” spelled backwards. After achieving this remarkable milestone, United Therapeutics began selling several pulmonary hypertension medicines. But would it work for Jenesis?

Amazingly, the little girl pulled through. Martine and Bina were incredibly grateful that their family renewed their sense of hope, but they also saw this issue was bigger than just their little unit. They could change the world.

Thanks to broader distribution of the drug, “there’s tens of thousands of people living a healthy, happy life with pulmonary hypertension,” Martine said. “Best of all…my own daughter Jenesis is now 30 years old, works at United Therapeutics, and is a happy, healthy young lady.”

Besides helping save her daughter, Martine’s dedication to this cause made her an even wealthier woman. Her company is valued at $4 billion — and she made $31.6 million in 2014. She was the second highest paid female CEO that year.

Martine has helped implement some altruistic policies at her company. If patients can’t afford the medicine, she provides it for free. “It hasn’t stopped us from being a successful pharmaceutical company,” she said. “I think actually doing the right thing always helps you do the best thing.”

Besides being a space lawyer and founding a few companies, Martine has many other interesting pursuits that shape her life. She calls herself a technologist, a person who “brings new technologies into being.”

In that vein, United Therapeutics’ next task is the cross-species organ transplants, something that’s been a fixture in many sci-fi series, including Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy.

“I always try to convert a moonshot into an earthshot,” Martine said in a Forbes interview. “The moonshot is to have an unlimited supply of transplantable organs.” The company has started their research with pig organs.

In 2020, United Therapeutics gained a new focus, treating acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is linked to COVID-19. They put two drugs in development, with additional research ongoing.

Outside of that field, she recently published a manifesto, “Virtually Human.” This is around the concept of cyber-humans — like organic clones, except these contain your thoughts and memories. Martine focused on their potential rights and freedoms.

Martine started the Terasem Movement, a new religion that combines Judaism, yoga, and believing in the power of technology. We feel like Martine spent a lot of time reading Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler.

The figurehead of Terasem is a floating head, Bina48, who was created to resemble Martine’s wife, Bina — truly amazing. And while not every parent is a technological genius, many others shared Rothblatt’s drive to do anything for their offspring.