Corporate Responsibility
Corporate Responsibility
United Therapeutics is committed to pursuing
critically important social, environmental,
and governance goals, while also delivering
excellent financial performance for our
shareholders.
Our commitment to social responsibility is
rooted in our founding as a mission-driven
company, intent on developing therapies, and
one day a cure, for the rare,
life-threatening lung condition known as
pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). To
fulfill this mission, we have developed an
ever expanding series of FDA-approved
medicines and devices to treat PAH, and have
launched Lung Biotechnology PBC, a public
benefit corporation with the goal of using
our innovative organ manufacturing programs
to cure PAH and other diseases by creating
an unlimited supply of transplantable lungs
and other organs. To our knowledge, this is
the first public benefit corporation
subsidiary of a public biotech company.
Our mission defines our culture and drives
everything that we do. We continually strive
to make life better for our patients and
their families. We also strive to create
inspiring work environments for our
employees, along with meaningful benefits
and programs designed to ensure every
Unitherian can create their own work/life
integration that enables top performance.
This includes offering employees significant
support for continuing education, on-site
childcare, meals, and other excellent health
and wellness focused benefits. We have also
established a minimum “living wage” and
provide meaningful opportunities for
employees to share in UT’s success by making
every full-time employee a shareholder
through our long-term incentive
programs.
As part of our corporate responsibility, we
are taking aggressive and groundbreaking
steps to diminish our climate impact. For
example, our facilities include one Platinum
LEED-certified building, two Gold
LEED-certified buildings, and four net zero
buildings located across three states. Our
innovative, energy-efficient building design
and operations, multiple solar arrays,
purchase of renewable energy credits (RECs)
and carbon offsets, and other green energy
technologies help us achieve a sustainable
urban campus – an extraordinary and rare
achievement for a biotech company. With
respect to our campus in North Carolina,
where RECs were not available at the time of
construction, our four-megawatt solar array
offsets 30% of our electrical consumption,
another significant achievement. One of the
most remarkable examples of these efforts
has been the construction of the net-zero
“Unisphere”, our 135,000 square foot,
high-rise office building in downtown Silver
Spring, Maryland, that uses extensive solar
arrays, heat mediating wells, and other
leading edge design technologies. It is the
largest urban office building to be energy
positive, generating more energy on site
than it consumes. Given the significant
threat of climate change, United
Therapeutics has responded with these and
other environmentally sound actions and
programs for the good of the planet and our
lives.
United Therapeutics has made a strong
commitment to diversity, both on our Board
of Directors and throughout our company. We
believe that in order for United
Therapeutics to be a great place to work, it
has to be a diverse and inclusive place of
work. We continuously evaluate our diversity
at every level of our organization, work to
ensure our leadership is reflective of our
workforce, and have taken steps recently to
formalize our diversity
and inclusion efforts.
Finally, our Board of Directors has led the
majority of our peers in implementing best
practice governance practices. We actively
engage with our shareholders multiple times
per year so that we can hear their
priorities, consider them thoughtfully, and
act accordingly. Consequently, in the last
several years, we have adopted majority
voting and proxy access policies, initiated
a Board declassification process, and
imposed a tighter limit on director outside
board membership.
Corporate responsibility has long been a
guiding tenet and core principle for all
Unitherians. We are eager to share
additional information regarding our
company’s environmental, social, and
governance (ESG) goals, activities, and
accomplishments here on our website, and in
our first Corporate Social Responsibility
report (CSR) during 2020.
We invite you to read more about our
corporate responsibility commitments to our
Patients, our
People, our
Planet and Communities, and our
Principles and Other
Priorities.