When European researchers published the genome of
the HeLa cancer cell line last month, they didn't think to ask for permission from the family of Henrietta Lacks, the woman those cells came from — what some experts say was a serious ethical lapse.
HeLa cell lines, derived from the cervical
cancer of a woman named Henrietta Lacks, have been used for decades to study resistance to
cancer drugs.
Given the widespread use of the
HeLa cell line, Lars Steinmetz and his colleagues at EMBL decided that conducting an extensive analysis of its genome could illustrate the changes caused by
cancer — and also help researchers compare versions of the
cell line that have evolved over decades of growth in labs around the world.
HuH - 7 (human HCC), HepG2 (human hepatocellular blastoma), 293T (human embryonic kidney fibroblast),
HeLa (human cervical
cancer cells), NIH 3T3 (murine fibroblast), and HCT116 (human colon cancer) and its derived cell line HCT116 p21 − / − (kindly provided by Dr. B. Vogelstein, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase and the Sydney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
cancer cells), NIH 3T3 (murine fibroblast), and HCT116 (human colon
cancer) and its derived cell line HCT116 p21 − / − (kindly provided by Dr. B. Vogelstein, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase and the Sydney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
cancer) and its derived
cell line HCT116 p21 − / − (kindly provided by Dr. B. Vogelstein, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase and the Sydney Kimmel Comprehensive
Cancer Center of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
Cancer Center of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD; ref.