Pig Hearts In Humans! How Aliana Rothblatt Makes The Unthinkable Plausible

American lawyer, author, entrepreneur, and transgender woman Martine Aliana Rothblatt's six-year-old daughter was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension which is a rare lung and heart disease without a cure in 1996. Undeterred, Rothblatt, also the co-founder of Sirius Satellite Radio, launched her biotech firm to find one.

Rothblatt believed that there was nothing worse than being told that one's daughter was going to die. And without giving up on the same, Rothblatt told Forbes in 2018, “I will find a way, or she was going to die because all of the previous people with this illness had died.”

Rothblatt's unstoppable perseverance transformed lives

Rothblatt, born in San Diego in 1954, hitchhiked the country playing music while studying communications at UCLA. Once a tour of a satellite facility in the Seychelles left her fascinated with the idea of using satellite networks to beam music to listeners around the world. And then after returning to the US, she got a joint law degree and MBA from UCLA and eventually took a gig as a telecommunications lawyer for a firm in Washington, DC.

Perhaps America’s best-known transgender CEO, she underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1994 and has spent decades as an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, most notably speaking out against North Carolina’s controversial bathroom law in 2016. She is also a licensed helicopter pilot who helped build the world’s first full-sized electric chopper and owns at least eight homes in four states.

Nearly three decades later, Rothblatt’s daughter is now healthy and in her 30s. Meanwhile, shares of the now publicly traded firm, United Therapeutics, are up 54 times their price at its 1999 IPO (An Initial Public offering). This year alone, shares have surged, up 50% so far in 2024 and up 40% since April 30 which have become more than enough to make Rothblatt the world’s newest billionaire. Since then, Investors have been cheering and hoping on United Therapeutics after it announced a $1 billion accelerated stock repurchase program in March, signalling it’s bullish about its pulmonary hypertension drugs.

Also, the driving up of the stock is excitement over the 41% year-over-year jump in revenue from its star drug, Tyvaso. No one has benefitted more financially from United Therapeutics’ success than Rothblatt, who has long been one of America’s wealthiest self-made women.

Rothblatt has led the $14.7 billion (market capitalization) firm as the CEO since she founded it. She has also been instrumental in helping push its subsidiary Revivicor into xenotransplantation which is the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues between members of different species. She, therefore, specifically worked on manufacturing pig organs to transplant into humans with end-stage renal and cardiac diseases.

In 2022 and 2023, United Therapeutics led two successful transplants of hearts grown in genetically altered pigs. It announced its first successful transplant of one of its pig kidneys to a living human in April and is spending $100 million on a new facility to further study the viability of xenotransplantation.

According to Forbes, the net worth of Rothblatt was $390 million in 2015, after the company had found a successful treatment for PAH with Orenitram. By 2021, with United Therapeutics stock on the rise, she was worth some $585 million. And, now given her 650,000 shares along with additional options to acquire even more stock and the cash that has been accumulated over decades in her business simultaneously with houses in several states, her net worth has hit the $1 billion mark, making her one of just 35 self-made women billionaires in America. If United Therapeutics succeeds in saving lives with this procedure, it would engrave yet another milestone in Rohblatt's career. 

A transhumanist, Rothblatt believes that someday people will be able to upload their minds to computers with the potential to create computer-run doppelgangers. She co-founded the Terasem Movement, a religious organization, in 2004 to propagate those ideas with her wife of 42 years, Bina (in whose image Rothblatt had built a humanoid head-and-shoulders robot).

It’s just one of the many moonshot bets that have driven Rothblatt for decades to dive into everything from satellite radio to growing pig organs to help treat her daughter’s disease, making her a billionaire along the way. “Instead of my daughter having no chance of getting an organ, there will be enough organs for everybody," Rohblatt proudly said in 2016.