Lacks family lawsuit to go to settlement conference
The lawsuit over a biotechnology company’s profiting off Henrietta Lacks’ cell line will head to settlement talks in U.S. District Court in Baltimore next week, leaving room to wind down the legal showdown between Thermo Fisher Scientific and the surviving family of the resident of Baltimore County’s Turner Station.
The case was referred last week to Magistrate Judge J. Mark Coulson, and was scheduled Thursday for a settlement conference Monday, according to court records.
A settlement could put an end to the suit in which Lacks’ family members allege the Massachusetts-based company has unjustly enriched itself off cells taken from Lacks in 1951 when she was being treated for cervical cancer.
Physicians at Johns Hopkins Hospital took the sample without Lacks’ consent or knowledge. The cells kept replicating, creating the HeLa immortal cell line, which is commonly used in biomedical research. HeLa cells have been used in several breakthroughs in medicine, such as the development of the polio vaccine, treatments for cancer and HIV/AIDS, and to study COVID-19.
The breakthroughs brought by Lacks’ cells went decades without much public recognition until Rebecca Skloot wrote the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” which Oprah made into a 2017 film.
Her legacy prompted Baltimore Rep. Kweisi Mfume to file legislation seeking to posthumously grant her a Congressional Gold Medal. On Tuesday, U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin filed companion legislation in the Senate.
“While these cells continue to benefit millions across the world, they were taken without the consent or knowledge of Ms. Lacks and her family,” Cardin said in a statement, noting the high honor would “ensure that her contributions are recognized and honored for generations to come.”
In the lawsuit, filed in
October 2021, Lacks’ family is asking U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman to order the company to pay Henrietta Lacks’ living descendants for products derived from the cells. The family retained prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump to litigate the matter.
Boardman has not yet ruled on Thermo Fisher’s motion to dismiss the case, which has been pending for months. The biotech company said in the filing that the Lacks family did not meet the statute of limitations for a lawsuit as they made public statements about potential litigation in the years after Skloot published her bestselling book in 2010.
Representatives for Crump could not be reached for comment Friday and Thermo Fisher did not respond to a request for comment.
Any settlement could have broad implications for others in the biotech industry, as attorneys representing the Lacks family have suggested further litigation against companies that profit from HeLa cells.