Bayer said in its petition that consumers should not be able to sue it under state law for failing to warn that Roundup increases cancer risk because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found no such risk and requires no such warning. In fact, it argued, federal law does not allow it to add any warning to the product beyond the EPA-approved label.

Why it matters: Bayer is a major supplier of crop protection products, including Roundup, for Canadian farmers

The company tried to make that case to the Supreme Court and was rebuffed in 2022, but a federal appeals court has since agreed with the company in a split from other appeals courts. The Supreme Court is generally more likely to take cases where federal appeals courts are divided.

A Supreme Court victory for Bayer would likely make it much more difficult for the lawsuits to continue, though it is not clear whether it would eliminate them entirely.

Friday’s petition came in the case of John Durnell, who in 2023 won a $1.25-million verdict in a St. Louis, Missouri state court. Bayer has been hit with much larger verdicts over Roundup, most recently a $2.1-billion award last month to a plaintiff in Georgia.

The company has paid about $10 billion to settle claims that Roundup, based on the herbicide glyphosate, causes cancer. About 67,000 further cases are pending, for which the group has set aside $5.9 billion in legal provisions.

CEO Bill Anderson has struggled to revive a share price that has plunged by more than 70 per cent since Bayer’s $63-billion acquisition of Monsanto in 2018 that saddled it with costly litigation and debt.

The company’s problems include the glyphosate litigation, a 2023 development setback for its most promising experimental medicine, weak agriculture markets and pressure from some investors to separate or sell businesses. Bayer plans to seek shareholder approval to raise equity capital worth close to 35 per cent of its outstanding shares over the next three years to cover possible costs of U.S. litigation.

The company has warned U.S. lawmakers it could stop selling Roundup, which is widely used by U.S. farmers, unless they can strengthen legal protection against the litigation. It has already replaced glyphosate with other ingredients in the home consumer version of Roundup.

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The lawsuit was filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas by Bryce Martinez, a Pennsylvania resident who alleges he developed type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, diagnosed at age 16, as a result of consuming the companies’ products.

His lawyers at the firm Morgan & Morgan, a major U.S. plaintiffs’ firm, described the case as the first of its kind.

The other companies being sued are Post Holdings, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestle’s U.S. arm, WK Kellogg, Mars, Kellanova and Conagra.

“There is currently no agreed upon scientific definition of ultra-processed foods,” Sarah Gallo, senior vice president of product policy for the Consumer Brands Association, an industry group representing food and beverage makers, said in a statement.

“Attempting to classify foods as unhealthy simply because they are processed, or demonizing food by ignoring its full nutrient content, misleads consumers and exacerbates health disparities.”

Evidence has grown in recent years that highly processed foods are linked to a wide range of chronic health problems. Food described by researchers as “ultra-processed” includes many packaged snack foods, sweets and soft drinks made with substances extracted from whole foods or synthesized artificially.

Current U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf has said that ultra-processed foods are likely addictive. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has criticized the food industry and the FDA for failing to regulate it.

Martinez’s lawsuit alleges that the food companies have long known their products are harmful and deliberately engineered them to be as addictive as possible. It argues that they are drawing from the same “cigarette playbook” as tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, which for a time owned the companies that became Kraft Heinz and Mondelez.

The lawsuit includes claims for conspiracy, negligence, fraudulent misrepresentation and unfair business practices. It seeks an unspecified amount of compensatory and punitive damages.

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In addition to the jury verdict in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, Bayer said a California farmer, who said he contracted the same type of cancer from exposure to the product, and his wife on Tuesday voluntarily dropped their lawsuit while a trial was underway in the in state court in Sonoma County, California.

“We continue to stand behind the safety of Roundup and will confidently defend the safety of our products and our good faith actions in any future litigation,” Bayer said in a statement.

Scott Love, a lawyer for Carl Kline, the plaintiff in the Pennsylvania case, said the jury had not been allowed to hear key evidence, including a finding by a World Health Organization body that glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient, was likely capable of causing cancer.

A lawyer for the California plaintiffs, Michael and Bobbie Meyer, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It was not immediately clear why the Meyers dropped their case.

Tuesday’s victories come on the heels of another trial win for the company in Arkansas on Friday. Bayer has now prevailed in 13 of the last 20 Roundup trials, while plaintiffs have scored large verdicts totaling more than $4 billion, including $2.25 billion in a single case in January.

The company is appealing its trial losses, which include large punitive damages awards that are likely to be reduced because they exceed U.S. Supreme Court guidance.

Around 165,000 claims have been brought in the U.S. against Bayer over Roundup, which the company acquired as part of its $63 billion purchase of U.S. agrochemical company Monsanto in 2018. Many were resolved as part of a $9.6 billion settlement in 2020, but about 54,000 remain.

Bayer CEO Bill Anderson told investors in a call on Tuesday that he was “considering every possible means to bring closure” to the litigation, including solutions “outside the courtroom,” though he did not offer details.

The company phased out sales of glyphosate products for home use last year, though it still sells other formulations under the Roundup name.

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The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that a federal jury was wrongly told to assess punitive damages for Bayer and BASF together, rather than separately. It said a new trial was needed to determine punitive damages for each company.

BASF, which had argued on appeal that the joint award was unfair because the case focused on the conduct of Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, said in a statement that it was pleased with the ruling.

“We are confident that BASF’s reprehensible conduct and sizable net worth will result in an even larger punitive damages award upon retrial,” Tracey George, a lawyer for farmer Bill Bader, said in an email.

Bayer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The order does not affect the jury’s verdict that the companies are responsible, and leaves in place $15 million in non-punitive damages (all figures US$).

The jury originally awarded $250 million in punitive damages, but a federal judge later slashed the punitive portion to $60 million.

Bader’s lawsuit, one of more than 100 similar lawsuits over dicamba, went to trial in early 2020. Bayer in June 2020 announced it would pay up to $400 million to settle the remaining dicamba lawsuits.

Bader, who operates Missouri’s largest peach orchard, said dicamba drifted onto his property from nearby soybean and cotton farms.

Monsanto began selling dicamba-tolerant soybean and cotton seeds it developed in 2015 and 2016, respectively, leading to an explosion of dicamba use, Bader and other farmers have said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency imposed restrictions on the use of dicamba in November 2018.

— Brendan Pierson reports on U.S. health law from Reuters from New York.

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The deal covers U.S. corn producers, grain handling facilities and ethanol plants nationwide that sold corn priced after Sept. 15, 2013, according to a filing in Kansas federal court. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said in a statement that they believed the deal to be the largest agricultural class action settlement in U.S. history.

“We are very pleased with this outcome,” they said.

Cargill is still pursuing separate claims against Syngenta and is not part of the settlement. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) announced it reached a separate settlement with Syngenta in February.

Syngenta, now owned by Chinese chemical company ChemChina, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The settlement was first reported in September, but its details were not made public until Monday’s filing.

The farmers’ class action lawsuit, which was certified in 2016, concerns Syngenta’s 2010 decision to sell a strain of insect-resistant GMO corn called Agrisure Viptera in the U.S.

Lawyers for the corn farmers said Syngenta negligently commercialized the seeds before obtaining import approval from China, then a major buyer of U.S. corn.

Chinese authorities ultimately rejected millions of tonnes of the U.S. corn imports before the country later approved Viptera for import in December 2014.

More than 90 per cent of corn grown in the U.S., the world’s top supplier, is genetically engineered, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The loss of the Chinese market caused U.S. corn prices to plummet, the farmers’ lawyers said.

Syngenta denied wrongdoing. It said at the time that no company had ever delayed launching a U.S.-approved corn product in the U.S. just because China had yet to approve its import.

It also said the decline in sales to China was offset by exports to other countries.

In addition to the nationwide class of farmers, several state classes were certified. One of those went to trial, resulting in a US$217.7 million for more than 7,000 Kansas farmers in June.

— Reporting for Reuters by Brendan Pierson in New York.

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The documents, made public Tuesday, are part of a mass litigation in federal court in San Francisco claiming Monsanto failed to warn that exposure to Roundup could cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer.

The company has denied that the product causes cancer.

Plaintiffs claim that Monsanto’s toxicology manager ghostwrote parts of a scientific report in 2013 that was published under the names of several academic scientists, and his boss ghostwrote parts of another in 2000.

Both reports were used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine that glyphosate, the active chemical in Roundup, was safe, they said.

They cited an email from a Monsanto executive proposing to ghostwrite parts of the 2013 report, saying, “we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing” while researchers “would just edit + sign their names so to speak.”

In an email, a Monsanto spokeswoman denied that Monsanto scientists ghostwrote the 2000 report but did not directly address the 2013 report. She said the ghostwriting allegations were based on “cherry-picking” one email out of 10 million pages of documents.

“Monsanto scientists did not ghostwrite the paper,” the company said on a corporate blog Tuesday, stating the paper and its conclusions were the work of its listed authors, and the paper “also underwent the journal’s rigorous peer review process before it was published.”

Another filing focused on Jess Rowland, a former EPA deputy director who chaired a committee on cancer risk and who plaintiffs say worked with Monsanto to suppress studies of glyphosate.

The filing includes an email from a Monsanto employee recounting how Rowland told him he “should get a medal” if he could “kill” a study of glyphosate at the Department of Health and Human Services, a separate federal agency.

Rowland, who is retired, is not a defendant in the litigation. He could not immediately be located for comment. The EPA had no immediate comment.

The federal mass litigation includes about 60 lawsuits, according to Aimee Wagstaff, an attorney for the plaintiffs. Several hundred more lawsuits are pending in state courts, she said.

A California state court judge on Friday in a separate lawsuit ruled that California could classify glyphosate as a cancer risk.

— Reporting for Reuters by Brendan Pierson in New York. Includes files from AGCanada.com Network staff.

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Hundreds of millions of dollars may be at stake, as the technology promises commercial applications in treating genetic diseases, engineering crops, and other areas.

CRISPR works as a type of molecular scissors that can trim away unwanted parts of the genome, and replace them with new stretches of DNA. It has quickly become the preferred method of gene editing in research labs because of its ease of use compared with older techniques.

The hearing is before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board in Alexandria, Virginia. It will pit one group of researchers associated with the Broad Institute, affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, against another group linked to the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Vienna in Austria.

The latter team, led by Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and Vienna’s Emmanuelle Charpentier, applied for a CRISPR patent in 2013.

The Broad team, led by MIT’s Feng Zhang, filed a patent application months later, and became the first to obtain a CRISPR patent in 2014. It has since obtained additional patents. The Berkeley team has obtained CRISPR patents as well, though the 2013 application has not been granted.

In April 2015, the Berkeley team petitioned the patent agency to launch a so-called interference proceeding, claiming Broad’s patents covered the same invention as the Berkeley team’s 2013 application.

Tuesday’s hearing will focus on preliminary motions, which the panel is expected to decide within the next few weeks.

One of those motions, filed by Broad, could end the case. Broad has argued that its patents, which describe the use of CRISPR specifically in animal cells, represent a breakthrough beyond the Berkeley team’s application, which described it more generally. CRISPR occurs naturally in bacteria.

The two teams, Broad has said, are not really claiming the same invention at all. If the panel agrees, the interference proceeding will end, and Broad’s patents will remain intact. Rulings from the panel can be appealed in federal court.

Otherwise, the proceeding will likely go on for another year or more, as the panel weighs evidence to determine which team was first to invent the technology.

Broad spokesman Lee McGuire said in a statement that the institute was confident of its case. Berkeley representatives could not be reached for comment.

The CRISPR dispute is among the last-ever interference proceedings, which were phased out by a 2011 patent reform law. The America Invents Act changed the U.S. patent system from a “first to invent” to “first inventor to file” for patent applications after March 16, 2013.

If the Berkeley team’s challenge succeeds, Broad could lose its patent rights.

Broad has already licensed its CRISPR patents for human therapeutics research to Editas Medicine, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech firm whose founders included both Zhang and Doudna, who has since left.

It has also licensed its technology to large businesses, including agriculture company Monsanto and General Electric’s medical technology subsidiary GE Healthcare.

Doudna co-founded Berkeley biotech firm Caribou Biosciences, which licenses Berkeley’s intellectual property and is working on CRISPR with other companies, including Novartis and Dupont.

— Brendan Pierson reports on health law for Reuters from New York.

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