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.