Henrietta Lacks’ family sues two more pharma giants for unjust enrichment

The family of Henrietta Lacks sued two pharmaceutical giants for unjust enrichment on Monday, arguing they profited from Lacks’ genetic material without consent.

The suit against Novartis Pharmaceuticals and Viatris, in federal court in Baltimore, was filed almost a year to the day after the Lacks estate won an undisclosed settlement from Thermo Fisher Scientific.

That lawsuit and the 2010 biography “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” by Rebecca Skloot, shone a light on the history of medical racism.

Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer and admitted to a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. While she was there, doctors took tissue samples from her cervix without her consent and used them for research. The cells from that sample proved to reproduce, and since then, the “HeLa cell line” has proved critical in the discovery of the polio vaccine, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization and other medical advancements.

RELATED: Henrietta Lacks’ family settles with company in lawsuit over ‘immortal’ cell line

Lacks died of cervical cancer later in 1951. Her family didn’t learn about the tissue samples or the impact of the HeLa cell line for decades.

The complaint states this case is about these companies “making conscious choices to commercialize the living genetic material of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, grandmother, and community leader, despite the corporations’ knowledge that Mrs. Lacks’s tissue was taken from her without her consent or knowledge by physicians at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Defendants have reaped massive profits by exploiting Mrs. Lacks’s cells as a biological factory to create and patent new drugs.”

The suit says a subsidiary of Viatris “heavily relied on Mrs. Lacks’s genetic material as a crucial element in their research and development activities.” Novartis, it says, “extensively developed and commercialized HeLa cell lines to secure intellectual property rights that underpin its market presence, generating substantial profits that would not have been possible without Henrietta Lacks’ cells.”

RELATED: WHO honors Henrietta Lacks, Baltimore woman whose cells served science

The suit notes that Novartis’s website includes a page noting her tissue was “surreptitiously commercialized for research purposes without her knowledge.” It notes that a former Novartis CEO wrote online that “The experiences of people like Henrietta Lacks … continue to leave emotional wounds in the Black community in the United States.”

“Defendants’ choice to continue utilizing HeLa cells despite the cell lines’ origin and the concrete harms 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,” the complaint states. “Novartis’s business is nothing more than a perpetuation of this theft.”

The estate is asking for a jury trial and wants the court to order the companies “to disgorge the full amount of (their) net profits obtained by commercializing the HeLa cell line to the Estate of Henrietta Lacks.”

Lacks’ grandson Ron L. Lacks, who lives in Baltimore, is the estate’s representative. The estate is represented by Baltimore attorney Kim Parker, Chris Seeger and Chris Ayers of the New Jersey firm Seeger Weiss, and the prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump.

Neither Novartis nor Viatris immediately responded to requests for comment on Tuesday.