20 - 025 HeLa an immortal cell line.

 In 1965 HeLa cells were used to create the first human-animal hybrid by fusing HeLa cells with mouse embryo cells allowing for the mapping of genes in specific chromosomes that lead eventually to the Human Genome Project and thus the definition of the Digital Human.

The HeLa is named after the first two letters of the patients first and last names so in this case Henrietta Lacks lead to the naming of this immortal cell line. More about Henrietta Lacks later.  

The HeLa cell line is the oldest and most commonly used immortalised human cell line. These cells that have been kept alive and allowed to reproduce over many years and will continue indefinitely to reproduce into the future provided they are looked after by research laboratories. These are cells kept “in vitro” meaning in glass colloquially called “test tube experiments”. Although it can make use of a variety of laboratory equipment to store them in ranging from test tubes, flasks, vats, petri dishes and microtiter plates. Components of a living organism are isolated from their normal biological surroundings. These can be microorganisms, cells or biological molecules.

This leads to a branch of biological science informally known as omics where the suffix – omics is added to the end to form genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, foodomics, transcriptomics and glycomics. The suffix ome is used to address the objects of study of such fields such as genome, proteome and metabolome. The “ome” indicating the whole thing. Bioinformaticians and molecular biologists focus upon the objects ending in “ome”.

The significant thing was the HeLa cell was digitally mapped so its precise structure could be viewed like you would view computer code. It was a particularly aggressive cancer cell having a very fast rate of reproduction. The cancer is triggered by the human papillomavirus virus which causes a cell to mutate to become cancerous. Now Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccines have been developed and are used preventing 70% of these cervical cancers taking hold.

This blog is not looking at this scientific detail today but at the source of the HeLa Immortal Cell Line. It was an African-American woman called Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) whose cells from a cervical cancer tumour biopsied by the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, USA that started this cell line. Unfortunately the cancer was to cause her death in 1951.

Read the detail about Henrietta Lacks at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta Lacks

Now this whole subject had a very low media profile until in 2000 the author Rebecca Skloot documented extensive histories of both the HeLa cell line and the Lacks family. This was then followed in 2010 by the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and then a film based upon the book in 2017.

Read up more detail at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca Skloot using the links within this post to investigate further.

So after 69 years the cells in Henrietta Lacks cervical cancer tumour are still living and reproducing in research labs across the world. In fact it has been recently used in the search for the coronavirus vaccine.