Henrietta Lacks Cancer Cell Case Facing Federal Court Test

The Baltimore Sun: Court To Consider Whether Henrietta Lacks’ Family’s ‘Unprecedented’ Lawsuit Over Use Of Her Cells Can Continue 
A federal judge will decide whether the family of Henrietta Lacks has enough legal standing to continue their lawsuit against the biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific after the two sides argued in court Tuesday about the use of cells taken from Lacks over 70 years ago. At question is whether Thermo Fisher — and other companies — ought to compensate Lacks’ living descendants for products derived from cervical cancer cells taken without her consent while she was receiving treatment at Johns Hopkins in 1951. Lacks, a Black woman from Baltimore County, died soon after the cells were taken due to complications from the cancer treatment she received. (Sanderlin, 5/17)

In other pharmaceutical industry news —

Oklahoman: Hearing-Loss Drug Developed At OKC Institute Gets Licensing Agreement
Scientists at the Hough Ear Institute in Oklahoma City have taken an important step toward developing a treatment that could restore the ability to hear for people who’ve experienced hearing loss as they age or from repeated exposure to loud noises. The treatment has been licensed to pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, which will take the drug through tests for safety and efficacy. The milestone has been a long time coming, said Dr. Richard Kopke, the CEO of the Hough Ear Institute. Kopke began dreaming about the technology that would make the treatment possible in 1996. More intensive work started on the project around 2009, he said. (Branham, 5/17)

Stat: Study: Drugmakers Use Monopoly Tactics To Thwart Generic Competition For Inhalers
For more than three decades, drugmakers have used various tactics to win and extend monopolies on inhalers for combating asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which thwarted lower-cost generic competition that could have saved patients and payers countless dollars, a new analysis finds. These moves included winning patents on the devices, not just the medications in the devices; combining old ingredients into new inhalers; shifting ingredients from one inhaler to another; and adding new patent and exclusive rights bestowed by regulators after approvals. As a result, the average time from approval to the last expired patent or regulatory exclusivity was 28 years. (Silverman, 5/17)

Stat: Blood Pressure Pills Are Costly, Hard To Find In Some Lower-Income Countries
A clutch of serious challenges — high prices, a lack of effective combination pills, and a failure to register some medicines with government authorities — has restricted access to many high blood pressure drugs in a sample of low and middle-income countries, a new analysis finds. As a result, the ability to control a widespread medical condition that is a risk factor for the leading cause of death worldwide is being hindered, according to the analysis conducted by the nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives and Doctors Without Borders. The groups noted that nearly three-quarters of all people who have high blood pressure live in low- and middle-income countries, but less than 10% are effectively treated. (Silverman, 5/17)

Axios: Seniors See Spike In Drug-Related Deaths
Drug-related deaths among adults 65 and older doubled over the course of a decade, with overdoses and misuse of prescription medications from 2018 to 2020 weighing hardest on Black communities, a new report from UnitedHealth Group finds. While adolescents and young adults have received much of the attention as U.S. overdose deaths hit new records, seniors have posted the largest increase in intentional and unintentional deaths compared with other age groups 15 and older, according to the report. (Bettelheim, 5/17)

Stat: Report Cites 'Urgent' Need To Recruit More Diverse Clinical Trial Participants
The persistent lack of diversity among participants in clinical trials is a critical issue that is harming both populations that have long been left out of pivotal medical studies and the entire biomedical research enterprise, according to the authors of a report released Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Describing the need to move away from trials that focus largely on white men as “urgent,” the report’s authors called for a paradigm shift that gives less power to institutions that fund and conduct clinical research and more to communities under study. The sternly worded report said funding to include and recruit more diverse participants should be a priority that is enforced and said such investments could eventually lead to massive cost savings as the nation’s health disparities are reduced. (McFarling, 5/17)

Stat: New Molecular ‘Black Box’ Records How Cells Fly Into Tumor Territory 
Biologists Tyler Jacks and Jonathan Weissman’s mice may look like any other lab mice — plain, pale, and furry — but cancer geneticists see them as a “technical tour de force.” “It’s a pretty heavily engineered mouse,” said Weissman, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute. Engineered into that mouse is intricate molecular machinery that allowed Weissman and his team to trace the ancestries of single tumor cells, placing them on a tumor’s family tree with an unprecedented level of detail. With those findings, scientists say that Weissman, in a new paper published this month, has begun to uncover new insights into the fundamental biology of tumors and how they evolve. (Chen, 5/18)