United Therapeutics Brand Guidelines: Silver Spring 1996, a PBC Charter & Pig Organs

A company built around one rare disease.

United Therapeutics was founded in 1996 by Martine Rothblatt, a lawyer, author and entrepreneur whom English Wikipedia credits with creating the business that became Sirius XM satellite radio. From the start the company concentrated on pulmonary arterial hypertension, or PAH, a rare disease of the blood vessels of the lungs. On its investor website it describes its aim as developing treatments “for rare, deadly diseases,” under the one-word heading “Onward!”

It is unusual in having two headquarters. Wikipedia names Silver Spring, Maryland, and Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, as co-headquarters, with further sites at Magog and Bromont in Quebec, Melbourne and Jacksonville in Florida, Blacksburg in Virginia and Manchester in New Hampshire, and its press releases carry both towns in their datelines. Wikipedia describes the Silver Spring laboratory and office complex as being used for commercial manufacturing of active ingredients and finished products, and the Research Triangle Park site as a manufacturing plant and office building that also houses research, logistics and packaging staff.

The company went public in 1999 and trades on Nasdaq as UTHR. Its early acquisitions, Wikipedia records, were SynQuest in 1999 and Cooke Pharma in 2000. Its first major medicine was Remodulin, a prostacyclin vasodilator for PAH, approved by the FDA in 2002, which Wikipedia describes as giving patients an alternative to GlaxoSmithKline’s Flolan.

Remodulin, Tyvaso and Unituxin.

The product line grew around the same disease. Wikipedia lists FDA approvals covering strengths and routes of Remodulin, Orenitram, Tyvaso and Tyvaso DPI for PAH, and says the company also markets Adcirca, a tadalafil medicine, under a licence from Eli Lilly. In February 2020 the FDA cleared the Remunity pump for delivering Remodulin under the skin, and on 31 March 2021 Tyvaso was approved for pulmonary hypertension associated with interstitial lung disease, after the INCREASE study. Tyvaso DPI, a dry-powder inhaler containing treprostinil, was approved in May 2022.

One product sits outside lung disease. In March 2015 the FDA approved the company’s Biologics License Application for Unituxin, a monoclonal antibody used in children with high-risk neuroblastoma, a rare cancer, Wikipedia records. The company now says it has six FDA-approved therapies, covering PAH, pulmonary hypertension with interstitial lung disease and neuroblastoma.

Its pipeline stays close to the lungs. Wikipedia names a Phase 3 study of ralinepag in PAH and the TETON studies in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. In October 2026 the company announced FDA clearance to proceed with a clinical trial of a treprostinil-iloprost inhaled combination for PAH, and in November 2026 it announced a buydown of the royalty it had owed Pfizer on ralinepag.

Its corporate form is its other signature. On 30 September 2021, after shareholders approved a charter amendment at a special meeting that day, United Therapeutics converted to a public benefit corporation, according to its announcement of that date, which called it the first such conversion by a public biotech or pharmaceutical company. The company says its public benefit purpose is “to provide a brighter future for patients” through new medicines and technologies that expand the supply of transplantable organs. It had already run a subsidiary, Lung Biotechnology PBC, which it describes as the first public benefit corporation subsidiary of a publicly traded biopharmaceutical company. According to Wikipedia, that subsidiary worked on perfusion technology to preserve donor lungs, stabilising lungs that would otherwise have been discarded, to address the shortage of lungs for transplant.

Design and documentation.

Biotechnology companies sell things that are almost impossible to photograph. A medicine made from a strand of RNA or an engineered antibody has no shape a camera can see, so the sector leans on a small set of stand-in images: rendered molecules, ribbons and double helices, antibodies drawn as glowing Y-shapes, and close-ups of cells under a microscope. These macro images carry most of the visual weight on corporate websites, investor decks and annual reports.

The second familiar picture is the laboratory itself. Scientists at benches with pipettes, racks of sample tubes and gloved hands over a plate reader appear again and again, because they show work in progress rather than a finished product. Alongside them sit patient-advocacy portraits: people living with a rare disease, their families and the groups that represent them, photographed in everyday settings rather than in the clinic.

Architecture does the rest. Glass-fronted lab campuses in clusters such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, Copenhagen and South San Francisco stand in for scale and ambition, and company websites often show their buildings alongside their people. The calendar adds its own stage: the BIO International Convention and the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, held each January in San Francisco, are where pipelines are presented to partners and investors.

Within that common language, names and colours do much of the work of telling companies apart. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, where it is based, what it makes and what has happened to it — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. No product, logo or pack is reproduced, and the palettes are our own unofficial interpretation.

“Onward!”

The second half of the story is organs. In 2011 United Therapeutics acquired Revivicor, a company working on gene-edited animals as alternative tissue sources, and began a xenokidney programme, Wikipedia says. In January 2022 a pig heart provided by Revivicor was used at the University of Maryland Medical Center in the first pig-to-human heart transplant, Wikipedia records. In 2021 engineers from its Unither Bioelectronics subsidiary flew donor lungs between two Toronto hospitals by drone, and in 2022 the company showed a 3D-printed lung scaffold. In October 2023 it bought the bioengineering company IVIVA Medical, and in December 2023 it completed the acquisition of Miromatrix Medical, which works on bioengineered organs made from human cells.

The work has moved into clinical trials. The first surgery in EXPAND, a United Therapeutics–sponsored trial of its UKidney in patients with end-stage kidney disease, was performed at NYU Langone Health, NYU Langone announced in November 2025. The UKidney comes from a pig with ten gene edits: six human genes added and four pig genes inactivated, the announcement said. The company says it is working on manufactured organs and organ alternatives for kidneys, hearts, lungs and livers.

The company’s web address, unither.com, is a contraction of its name, and several subsidiaries carry the Unither prefix. The unrelated contract manufacturer Unither Pharma uses a different address. United Therapeutics remains an independent listed company with its two headquarters in Maryland and North Carolina.

For a design guide, United Therapeutics shows how a company can make its legal charter and its research ambitions part of its public identity. Compare BioMarin, another rare-disease specialist, and Pfizer, its counterparty on ralinepag. For this guide we use a deep harbour blue and a terracotta with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep United Therapeutics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.