Sustainability
Climate change, social inequity, and the actions of corporations have a direct impact on the health of individuals. We are committed to leading with sustainable practices, for our patients, clinicians, employees, investors and stakeholders.
Invitae’s commitment to sustainability is central to our mission and part of our DNA
We’ve embarked on a multiyear environmental, social, and governance (ESG) effort to reduce our carbon footprint and increase our work to support social equity across our business, while operating in an ethical and transparent manner. We advocate for policies that expand access to care for patients and help create the infrastructure needed to deliver personalized medicine. We believe that routine use of genetics in medicine will empower people to take steps to stay healthy longer and get healthy faster.
Read more in our Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) report that was distributed in April 2024.
Our tenets
Our approach reflects our passion for reaching more patients, supporting clinicians and advancing genetics. We developed the following core tenets to represent the principles that direct our actions, guide our decision-making across all levels of the organization and form the foundation of our sustainability efforts.
We spearhead the mission to bring comprehensive genetic information into mainstream medicine to improve healthcare for people worldwide.
We work to minimize our environmental impact and reduce our emissions footprint.
We implement programs that instill ethical practices and increase diversity, equity and inclusion among employees, patients, suppliers and partners throughout our value chain.
We ensure our governance structure and policies implement ethical, transparent and accountable business practices to ensure corporate performance and value.
Why it matters
Climate change is one of the defining crises of our time, and it is happening even more quickly than many scientists forecasted.
We are committed to protecting the environment and reducing the footprint of our business operations through proper waste management and increased energy efficiency. We understand the impact of our operations and recognize that our environmental commitment dovetails with our vision of improving healthcare affordability and accessibility.
We believe that driving down the cost of obtaining genetic information will increase its personal and clinical utility.
This is particularly true when it comes to populations and individuals who have historically been left out by the previously high cost of genetic testing, lack of access to a qualified clinician, and often missing or insufficient health care coverage. Through a combination of dramatically lowering the costs of our testing, advocacy with our partners who subsidize testing in specific patient populations, and a generous patient assistance program, we have been able to expand access and pledge to continue such efforts.
We view clinicians as critical partners in using genetic information to inform healthcare decisions for individual patients.
We have, over the years, invested heavily in streamlining our workflows, standardizing the information we deliver, and offering clinical support tailored to the needs of the individual. For example, in the US and Canada we provide genetic counseling services where they have not been readily available, which has historically affected access to genetic testing, especially for underserved populations.
We believe in the individual’s fundamental right to own and control their genetic information.
Throughout the world, we see a history of mistrust of the medical community by underserved populations. We place a heavy emphasis on both transparency and only sharing patient data with patients’ permission as ways to engender long-term trust in our approach.
We strongly believe that genetic information is more valuable when it’s shared (always patient-directed) within the academic and medical community.
In our scientific and clinical collaborations, we emphasize a mix of self-identified population groups in the study populations. In doing so, we are generating important data for underserved populations that have historically been left out of research.
Data use transparency and impact
Through Invitae, your de-identified data are advancing medical genetics and enabling the use of “real world” data to aid the development of new treatments. In 2023, Invitae released our updated Data use transparency and impact report, which lists all the ways de-identified data from Invitae patients were repurposed in 2022 to advance the field of genetics research. Read the full report here.