Just over a week after Henrietta Lacks' descendants settled a lawsuit against a biotech company they accused of unjustly profiting off her cells for generations, the family's attorneys have filed another claim against a different corporation. The new lawsuit, which targets California-based biopharmaceutical company Ultragenyx, was filed Thursday in Baltimore federal court, the same venue as the recently settled case, per the AP. Lawyers for the family have said they plan to bring a series of lawsuits against various entities that continue to reap rewards from the racist medical system that took advantage of Lacks. A Black mother of five from southern Virginia, Lacks and her family were living outside Baltimore when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951.
Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital saved a sample of her cancer cells collected during a biopsy—without her knowledge or consent. She died at age 31 in the hospital's "colored ward," but her genetic material lived on, the first human cells to continuously grow and reproduce in lab dishes. HeLa cells have since become a cornerstone of modern medicine, enabling countless scientific and medical innovations, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping, and even COVID-19 shots. The complaint says Ultragenyx has made a fortune by using HeLa cells to develop gene therapy products.
"Medical research has a long, troubled racial history," attorneys for the family wrote. "The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout American history. Indeed, Black suffering has fueled innumerable medical progress and profit, without just compensation or recognition." At the time doctors harvested cells from Lacks' cervical tumor, it wasn't illegal to do so without a patient's permission. But lawyers for her family accuse Ultragenyx of continuing to commercialize the results long after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known—an "unjust enrichment" claim that largely mirrors the recently settled lawsuit against Thermo Fisher Scientific, which was filed in 2021.
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The terms of that settlement haven't been disclosed. The suit filed Thursday claims Ultragenyx leadership failed to seek permission from Lacks' descendants after realizing where HeLa cells came from. "Ultragenyx's choice to continue utilizing HeLa cells despite the cell line's origin and the concrete harm it inflicts on the Lacks family can only be understood as a choice to embrace a legacy of racial injustice embedded in the US research and medical systems," attorney Ben Crump said in a statement. "Like anyone else, Black people have the right to control their bodies." A spokesperson for Ultragenyx didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Thursday.
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