Havasupai Tribe and Arizona State University Settlement Agreement: ASU to Return the Blood Samples

On April 21, 2010 the New York Times reported that the Havasupai tribe and Arizona State University (ASU) arrived at a settlement agreement relating to litigation over ASU’s alleged misuse of the Havasupai tribe’s blood samples originally collected for diabetes research. (Visit our forthcoming Human Specimen Collection, Biobanking, and Genetic Research Law and Policy Update for more information on the case.)

After millions of dollars spent on litigation in various suits, the tribe and ASU entered into the settlement agreement in March of this year. The settlement contains several provisions including details for ASU’s performance obligations such as:

(1) ASU will pay the plaintiffs a sum of $700,000;

(2) ASU will return all blood samples in its possession; and

(3) ASU will return documents such as lab books and genealogy materials containing research derived from the blood samples, it will direct IRBs at the universities involved in the suit not to approve ongoing or new research using the samples, and it will provide the tribe a list of entities to which it previously transferred the samples.

The settlement agreement also set forth a creative five year collaborative between ASU and the tribe designed to address the tribe’s needs in the areas of education, health and nutrition, economic development, architecture, engineering, and legal governance. Several of these provisions include pursuing funding opportunities to build a high school near the reservation, partnering ASU nursing students to provide clinical care in Supai village, and working with the tribe to develop business plans related to its tourism programs.

Like many other settlements, this agreement specified a monetary exchange. ASU's transfer of $700,000 (split among the forty-one plaintiffs) seems nominal compared to plaintiffs’ request for $25 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages. However, unlike other agreements, the money was arguably not the central concern here and would never alone be sufficient to remedy plaintiffs’ alleged damages without addressing the use and possession of the blood samples.

The return of the samples and research materials highlights several important issues that suggest our current standards and assumptions governing biobanking research are inadequate to address the needs of all research subjects, especially if blood and DNA is particularly significant to a group's cultural values and sense of identity.

First, subjects must be fully informed when they provide consent to use their blood for genetic research and the scope of the research should not exceed the original consent. Second, using the blood for purposes beyond the scope of the original consent may present serious dignitary concerns that researchers may overlook because the substance of these concerns may not even register as a possible harm or risk. Indeed, one of the ASU researchers maintained she was advancing important research and refered to the tribe's claims as "hysterical." Lastly, the importance of how the samples are (mis)used can be so vital to a particular group that return of the samples may be the only mechanism to fully remedy the group’s alleged dignitary harms.

-Katherine Drabiak-Syed