Henrietta Lacks Estate sues a company using its “stolen” cells

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) – The estate of Henrietta Lacks sued a biotech company on Monday, accusing it of selling cells that doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took from the black woman in 1951 to her without or without their consent as part of an “unfair medical system.”

Tissues taken from a woman’s tumor before her death from cervical cancer became the first human cells to be successfully cloned. Reproduced endlessly since, HeLa cells have become a cornerstone of modern medicine, enabling countless scientific and medical innovations, including polio vaccine development, genetic mapping, and even COVID-19 vaccines.

Lacks cells were harvested and developed long before the advent of consent procedures used today in medicine and scientific research, but lawyers for his family say Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Mass., Continued. to commercialize the results long after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known.

“It is scandalous that this company thinks it owns intellectual property rights over its grandmother’s cells. Why do they have intellectual rights over his cells and can they benefit from billions of dollars when his family, his flesh and blood, his black children, get nothing? One of the family’s attorneys, Ben Crump, said Monday at a press conference outside the federal courthouse in Baltimore.

Johns Hopkins said he never sold or profited from cell lines, but many companies have patented ways to use them. Crump said these distributors made billions from genetic material “stolen” from Lacks’ body.

Another family lawyer, Christopher Seeger, alluded to related claims against other companies.

Thermo Fisher Scientific “shouldn’t feel too lonely because they’re going to have a lot of company soon,” Seeger said.

The lawsuit asks the court to order Thermo Fisher Scientific to “return the full amount of its net profits obtained by marketing the HeLa cell line to the estate of Henrietta Lacks.” He also wants Thermo Fisher Scientific to be permanently banned from using HeLa cells without the permission of the estate.

On its website, the company says it generates around $ 35 billion in annual revenue. A company spokesperson reached by phone did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.

HeLa cells were discovered to have unique properties. While most of the cell samples died shortly after being removed from the body, its cells survived and thrived in the labs. This exceptional quality allowed her cells to be cultivated indefinitely – they became the first immortalized human cell line – allowing scientists to replicate studies using identical cells.

The remarkable science involved – and the impact on the Lacks family, some of whom suffered from chronic illnesses without health insurance – was documented in a 2010 bestselling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”. Oprah Winfrey portrayed her daughter in an HBO story film. The lawsuit was filed exactly 70 years after the day of his death, October 4, 1951.

“The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the sadly common struggle experienced by blacks throughout history,” says the lawsuit. “Indeed, the suffering of blacks has fueled countless medical advancements and profits, without fair compensation or recognition. Various studies, both documented and undocumented, have thrived on the dehumanization of blacks. “

Shobita Parthasarathy, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan who has studied intellectual property issues in biotechnology, said the lawsuit comes at a time when Lacks’ family is likely to have a sympathetic audience for their claims.

“We are at a point, not only after the murder of George Floyd but also the pandemic, where we have seen structural racism in action in all kinds of places,” she said. “We keep talking about a racial calculation, and this racial calculation also occurs in science and medicine.”

Parthasarathy said the case also comes amid revelations about how tech companies are profiting from mining customer data.

“I think this raises questions for all of us as to whether our informed consent structures are adequate to deal with the realities of how data is being taken away from us and used either to sell us things or to do business. ‘money to businesses,’ she said. .

A group of white Johns Hopkins doctors in the 1950s attacked black women with cervical cancer, cutting tissue samples from their patients ‘cervixes without or without their patients’ knowledge. their consent, according to the lawsuit.

Johns Hopkins Medicine has said it has examined his interactions with Lacks and his family for more than 50 years after the 2010 publication of Rebecca Skloot’s book. He says he “never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line,” but he acknowledged ethical responsibility.

“At several points over these decades we have seen that Johns Hopkins could – and should have – done more to educate and work with Henrietta Lacks’ family members out of respect for them, their privacy and their interests. personal, ”Johns Hopkins Medicine said. said on its website.

Crump, a Florida-based civil rights attorney, gained national notoriety representing the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd – Black people whose deaths at the hands of police and vigilantes helped revitalize a national movement towards police reform and racial justice.

Seeger, a New Jersey-based corporate litigator, has represented thousands of former NFL players in a concussion class action settlement and was a primary negotiator for the diesel emissions settlement. Volkswagen’s $ 21 billion with car owners.