Henrietta Lackss family reaches settlement in extracted cell lawsuit
Descendants of Henrietta Lacks, the Black woman whose cells have been central to decades of important scientific breakthroughs, settled litigation with a biotech company that had allegedly profited from the cells despite knowing that they were extracted without her consent, attorneys for both parties said.
Terms of the litigation, filed against Thermo Fisher Scientific, were not released.
“The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of court and will have no further comment,” both sides said in statements they released.
A spokeswoman for Thermo Fisher as well as the company’s outside attorneys declined to comment beyond the brief statement about the settlement. Attorneys for the Lacks family, speaking on what would have been Lacks’s 103rd birthday Tuesday, lauded the woman at the heart of the lawsuit.
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“Henrietta Lacks was not inferior — in fact, she was extraordinary,” Ben Crump said at a news conference Tuesday morning. “On this birthday, America should acknowledge that she was extraordinary in every way.”
“Her cells were robbed from her body,” Crump added.
The litigation had accused Thermo Fisher of using Lacks’s cells without approval from or payment to her family members — thus depriving them of billions of dollars and “the knowledge that a loved one’s body has been treated with respect.”
The dispute originated in what the lawsuit called a “racially unjust medical system.”
Lacks was only 31 and an East Baltimore mother of five when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. While being treated in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a doctor took a sample of her tumor without her consent and gave it to a research team.
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The team soon discovered the cells in her sample had a remarkable ability to grow outside the human body, opening up a universe of medical research. Johns Hopkins shared the “HeLa” cells with other researchers; vaccines for polio and the coronavirus were developed with these cells, as were cancer treatments and in vitro fertilization.
Neither Lacks nor her family knew any of this. She died soon after her diagnosis, on Oct. 4, 1951.
In their litigation, attorneys for the Lacks family identified 12 product lines sold by Thermo Fisher related to HeLa cells. Among those offerings, according to their complaint: Pierce HeLa Protein Digest Standard, T-REx HeLa Cell Line, and Cervical Adenocarcinoma (HeLa-S3) Total RNA.
In court filings, attorneys for Thermo Fisher had sought to have the lawsuit dismissed primarily on statute-of-limitations grounds, arguing that the Lacks family and their attorneys over the years had waited too long to sue the company. That effort was pending when the settlement was reached, according to court records.
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Christopher Ayers, another attorney for the Lacks family, indicated Tuesday other companies could be targeted.
“The fight against those who profit and chose to profit off of the deeply unethical and unlawful history and origins of the HeLa cells will continue,” Ayers said. “The ‘HeLa’ cells were not derived from Henrietta Lacks. They are Henrietta Lacks. Her cells live today, and those who chose to sell, mass-produce without the permission or consent, without compensation to the family, we will see them in court.”
Ayers declined to specify targets but said a key part of deciding whether to file more lawsuits will be how willing other companies are to step forward and work with the family.
“To the extent they’re not willing to do the right thing,” Ayers said, “we for sure will bring claims against others.”
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Ayers said the family does not want to target universities or others who use the cells for nonprofit research.
Ayers said that while the HeLa cells could produce more litigation, he does not expect a cascade of similar litigation related to other products.
In 2013, German scientists sequenced Lacks’s genome.
For decades, the family struggled to carry on without their mother. One of her daughters, Elsie, who had disabilities, was institutionalized and died at 15 in 1955. In the 1970s, two decades after Lacks’s death, members of her family started getting strange phone calls from researchers requesting blood samples. Their medical histories were published in research papers without their knowledge. One night, at a dinner party, a guest asked family members if they were related to the source of the famous HeLa cells. That’s how they found out cells from their mother were still alive all over the world.
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The family’s saga was recounted in the best-selling book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Lacks’s daughter Deborah Lacks Pullum worked closely with author Rebecca Skloot and was played by Oprah Winfrey in the movie of the same name. Lacks Pullum died in 2009.
Henrietta Lacks “has given the world an incredible contribution that has changed modern medicine for the last 70 years,” Crump said Tuesday. “Her contributions have improved the quality of life for people all across America, all across the world.”
In the litigation, a settlement conference had been scheduled for Monday, according to federal court records.
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