Henrietta Lacks’s Family Settles Suit With Novartis Over Use of Her Cells

Ms. Lacks’s family accused Novartis of profiting from her cells, which were taken from her without her consent in 1951, when she was dying of cervical cancer.

The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken from her without her consent in 1951, when she was dying of cervical cancer in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Ms. Lacks’s cells were the first to reproduce in a laboratory, outside the human body, and have been used in groundbreaking research, including to develop vaccines for polio and Covid-19 and treatments for cancer, Parkinson’s and the flu. The National Institutes of Health found the use of her cells, which were known as HeLa cells, was cited more than 110,000 times in scientific publications between 1953 and 2018.

In August 2024, more than 70 years after Ms. Lacks died at age 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave, her family filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland that accused Novartis, which is based in Switzerland, of amassing substantial profits through the use of the HeLa cell line.

Novartis owns hundreds of patents that had been developed through the use of HeLa cells, the lawsuit said, and had acknowledged on its website “the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical cancer cells were surreptitiously commercialized for research purposes without her knowledge.”

“Novartis was aware that these cells were taken without consent,” the lawsuit said. “Despite this, Novartis never sought or received permission from the estate of Henrietta Lacks to use her cells, treating them as mere tools or resources.”

In identical statements released this week, Novartis and lawyers for the Lacks family acknowledged that they had settled the lawsuit, but did not disclose the terms of the agreement.

“Members of the family of Henrietta Lacks and Novartis are pleased they were able to find a way to resolve this matter filed by Henrietta Lacks’s estate outside of court,” the statement said. “The terms of the agreement are confidential.”

Ben Crump, a lawyer for the Lacks family, said that her relatives were satisfied with the settlement.

“For the family and her grandchildren, this is certainly justice because people said they would never realize any benefit or compensation from her immortal HeLa cells, even though these pharmaceutical companies were profiting billions and billions of dollars,” Mr. Crump said in an interview.

The settlement is the second that the Lacks family has reached with a company it has accused of unjustly profiting from her cell line.

In August 2023, the Lacks family announced that it had reached an undisclosed settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, a Massachusetts-based firm. The family had accused it of selling the cells and trying to secure intellectual property rights on the products the cells had helped develop, without compensating the family or seeking its permission.

The family still has pending litigation against two other pharmaceutical companies: Viatris, based in Canonsburg, Pa., and Ultragenyx, based in Novato, Calif.

Mr. Crump said the lawsuits can only partly make up for the unjust treatment of Ms. Lacks.

“If it was truly justice, none of this would have happened to Henrietta Lacks,” Mr. Crump said. “She wouldn’t have been the victim of medical racism at Johns Hopkins. But you can pray to get some measure of justice, to offer respect and dignity to the life that was taken.”

Related Content