The $1.25 million lawsuit focuses on Bayer’s Roundup weed killer, which the plaintiff alleges gave him blood cancer
The US Supreme Court has agreed to consider an appeal from German chemical firm Bayer regarding a Roundup case where a man received $1.25 million in damages, alleging the weed killer caused his blood cancer.
The court announced the decision on Monsanto Co. v. Durnell in a Friday statement, with a decision anticipated by July. Bayer currently confronts thousands of comparable legal actions.
Roundup was originally owned by the now-defunct US agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology firm Monsanto, which Bayer acquired in 2018.
The core issue is whether Bayer and other producers should bear responsibility when they adhere to US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decisions on product warnings, yet violate state regulations that mandate warnings on potentially cancer-causing products.
Bayer contends that the EPA has concluded glyphosate, the primary ingredient in the disputed herbicide, is unlikely to cause cancer in humans, and has sanctioned Roundup labeling without cancer alerts.
In a statement on Friday, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson declared that “the US legal system must now clarify that companies cannot be penalized under state statutes for following federal warning label mandates.”
In 2023, a Missouri state court granted John Durnell $1.25 million for a failure-to-warn allegation, while rejecting all other claims and refusing to grant punitive damages.
The chemical firm then filed multiple appeals, and ultimately asked the US Supreme Court to examine the case in April 2025.
Confronted with a flood of Roundup-related litigation after buying Monsanto, Bayer allocated over $10 billion for potential damages in 2020, with that amount growing substantially in subsequent years.
In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that glyphosate could “probably” trigger cancer.