Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, alongside Seeger Weiss, has filed another unjust-enrichment lawsuit seeking justice for the estate of Henrietta Lacks, a Black Maryland woman who passed away in October 1951 after undergoing controversial medical treatment. The lawsuit, filed recently in Baltimore federal court, targets Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. and Viatris Inc., accusing them of commercializing drug products and gene therapy treatments using Lacks’s living genetic material or HeLa cell lines.
As detailed in the complaint, “Mrs. [Henrietta] Lacks’s cells were obtained through breach of a relation of trust and confidence.” Specifically, it alleges that “HeLa cells are Mrs. Lacks’s cells, taken by physicians in whom she had placed her trust without her consent or knowledge and for no therapeutic purpose.” For more information on this developing case, you can read the full article here.