Oprah Winfrey is on board to star in a project that’s in the pipeline from HBO Films. People magazine reports that Winfrey has a major role in the company’s adaptation of the 2010 book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” by Rebecca Skloot.

“The media mogul signed on as an executive producer when the book’s film rights were first acquired in 2010, and the network announced on Monday that she will star in the biopic as well as co-executive producing it with Skloot and ‘True Blood’ creator Alan Ball.”

The movie is scheduled to start filming this summer. The project “centers on the true story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cervical cancer cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, in 1951,” the report notes.

The report adds: “The story is told from the perspective of Winfrey’s character, protagonist Deborah Lacks, who explores how the unlicensed harvesting of her mother’s cancerous cells led to unprecedented medical breakthroughs.”