Martine Rothblatt wants to transform the way we transplant organs and she doesn’t take no for an answer. When her daughter came down with a rare, life-threatening illness several decades ago, Rothblatt started researching the illness, and founded a company to develop a treatment for it.
In the mid-1990s, Rothblatt’s daughter Jenesis developed pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare condition in which the arteries in the lungs and the heart become constricted, making it hard for blood to flow through them. Doctors gave her a grim prognosis: Without a lung transplant, she had roughly three-to-five years to live.