There are so many ways that United Therapeutics of Rockville, Maryland, is unlike other biotech firms — from its profitability to its unique culture — that perhaps this only merits a footnote. But it is the first company that I have ever seen publish its annual report as a comic book .  Written in the first person by a vice president of business development, Martin Auster (“That’s Doctor Auster to you, pal,” his pen-and-ink avatar shouts), the book even puts sales figures in 3-D, printed in red and blue so that you can look at them with classic, B-movie glasses. Also included: the secret to making money: “UT figured out early on that a company can be profitable by – drum roll, please… making more than it spends!”  The comic-cum-report begins with an aged Auster sitting with learned men at a “Copernicum nanotube table that reflected the bottle, our claret-glasses, and our faces as we leaned on our elbows.”  Before launching on his personal history – his frustration in med school, his days as a Wall Street analyst, and his decision to join UT, the future Auster gives this speech: “You all know that there are those biotech jobs that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence. You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, trying to accomplish something– and you can’t at first. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little – and then it happens, it all comes together, and you are only then able to successfully develop a therapy for an unmet medical need.”  For UT, the comic-book-as-annual report is par for the course. This is a company where meetings really have occurred in Second Life, where employees are referred to as Unitherians, and where a charismatic and futuristic chief executive and founder runs the show.  Martine Rothblatt, then known as Martin, was one of the minds behind what is now Sirius Satellite Radio. Then Martin’s daughter became sick with a deadly disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension, which was then only rarely treatable. At the same time, Martin was going through the process of gender reassignment, becoming Martine. She remained married to Bina, her wife and the mother of her children. In a world where she could create a new industry and change her very identity, though, Rothblatt felt powerless to help her daughter.  “I was an expert in satellites and I didn’t know anything about medicine,” she told me for a Forbes Magazine profile last year. But one of her daughter’s doctors told her that a potential treatment was languishing at Glaxo Wellcome. A Glaxo executive whose sister had PAH agreed to license the drug to UT, which was incorporated in 1996. The drug was approved in 2002.  At first investors thought PAH, which afflicts only 200,000 people in the U.S., was too small a market to build a company around. Rothblatt realized the drug would be profitable if it were priced at $100,000 per patient. Telling investors she was going to charge so much for patients like her daughter gave her a “sour taste” in her mouth, but it also created a market for PAH drugs, which are now made by other drug makers like Actelion and Gilead. United Therapeutics had annual sales of $600 million in the U.S.  Rothblatt already seems to live in the future, or at least a vision of it. She is fan of futurist Raymond Kurzweil, who serves on UT’s board. You can watch a robotic likeness of her wife, Bina, talk to a New York Times reporter here. Rothblatt has founded an institute dedicated to dramatically extend the human life span, and blogs about “techno-immortality” here. She has a Ph.D in bioethics, focusing on the ethics of transplanting organs from genetically engineered pigs into people. Out there? Maybe. But remember, Rothblatt is one of the most successful biotech entrepreneurs ever.  United Therapeutics shares are down 15% in the past three months as results of a clinical trial testing an oral version of the company’s pulmonary hypertension drug fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. Then again, most analysts do expect the treatment to be approved, and the company has run into regulatory doubts before — and come out ahead.
What kind of company puts out this kind of annual report? One of the country's most successful -- and unsung -- biotechnology firms.