The family of Henrietta Lacks filed a lawsuit Monday against two large pharmaceutical companies, alleging the firms have profited from exploiting the Baltimore County woman’s cell line. The lawsuit against Novartis and Viatris serves as the third installment of a legal saga that started with the family of the Turner Station resident hiring prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump and suing a biotechnology firm in 2021 . The Lacks family contends that the medical science industries have unjustly profited from cells belonging to their relative, who died in 1951 after having her cancer cells sampled at Johns Hopkins Hospital without her knowledge or consent.
Monday’s lawsuit is largely similar to the family’s first two cases — the first, where Thermo Fisher Scientific ultimately settled with the Lacks relatives as well as a second, ongoing suit that followed. But the “unjust enrichment” suit filed Monday, days after Lacks’ 104th birthday targets two different pharmaceutical companies, which reported combined 2023 revenues topping $60 billion. Spokespeople for Novartis, a Swiss company, and Viatris, the American firm founded in 2020 as a result of a merger between Mylan and Upjohn pharmaceutical companies, did not immediately respond Monday afternoon to requests for comment.
Since Lacks’ death, her cells — the “immortal” HeLa cell line that never stopped replicating — have been responsible for several medical breakthroughs, such as the polio vaccine, cancer research and in-vitro fertilization. Lawyers for her family have cast the sampling of the Turner Station resident’s cancer cells as “deeply unethical,” demonstrating a “disturbing history of medical racism.” Hopkins and others in the medical field have lauded Lacks for her unwitting contributions to medicine and acknowledged that the sampling, performed after Lacks checked in for symptoms later determined to be from cervical cancer, did not meet current ethical standards.
The Lacks family’s lawsuits have sought to recoup the profits gained by medical firms that have used HeLa cells, and to prevent them from using cells without permission from the estate. In Monday’s lawsuit, the family alleges that Novartis used Lacks’ genetic material as a “fundamental component” of their research, developing “hundreds” of patents using the cell line. The suit also claims Viatris “capitalized on and profited” from its predecessor Mylan’s portfolio of drugs that were developed using HeLa cells.
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