The estate of Henrietta Lacks filed a lawsuit in Maryland federal court on Thursday accusing biopharmaceutical company Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical of unlawfully profiting from cells that were taken ...

The HeLa cell line was used to test the first polio vaccine, develop a treatment for sickle cell anemia and create the first vaccine for human papillomavirus, or HPV. expand An image of so-called ...

According to the lawsuit, Ultragenyx's work on gene therapies - based on adeno-associated virus ... It also claims that Ultragenyx was aware of the origins of the HeLa cell line, ...

Henrietta Lacks, a Black mother of five, was dying of cervical cancer in 1951, when doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore took a sample of her cells without her knowledge or consent.

Her "immortal" cells—referred to as HeLa cells—have subsequently been used to cultivate a cell line that could replicate indefinitely under the right laboratory conditions and have been used ...

HeLa cells are not the only immortal cell line from human cells, but they were the first. Today new immortal cell lines can either be discovered by chance, as Lacks’s were, or produced through ...

The estate of Henrietta Lacks filed a lawsuit in Maryland federal court on Thursday accusing biopharmaceutical company Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical of unlawfully profiting from cells that were taken ...

NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with science journalist and author Rebecca Skloot about Henrietta Lacks, whose family just settled with a biotech company that used her cancer cells without consent.