The $1.25mn case centres on Bayer’s Roundup herbicide, which the plaintiff has claimed caused his blood cancer.
The US Supreme Court will hear an appeal by German chemical company Bayer on a Roundup-related case in which a man was awarded $1.25 million, claiming the herbicide gave him blood cancer.
The court made the announcement regarding Monsanto Co. v. Durnell in a statement on Friday, with a verdict expected by July. Bayer is currently facing thousands of similar lawsuits.
Roundup originally belonged to the now-defunct American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto, which was purchased by Bayer in 2018.
At the heart of the case is whether Bayer and other manufacturers should be held liable if they comply with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) rulings on product warnings, while still running afoul of state laws requiring warnings on goods that may be carcinogenic.
Bayer argues that the EPA has determined that glyphosate, the main component of the controversial herbicide, is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, and approved Roundup labels without cancer warnings.
In a statement on Friday, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said that “it is time for the US legal system to establish that companies should not be punished under state laws for complying with federal warning label requirements.”
In 2023, a court in the state of Missouri awarded John Durnell $1.25 million on a failure-to-warn claim, but struck down all other claims and declined to award punitive damages.
The chemical company subsequently filed several appeals, and eventually petitioned the US Supreme Court to review the case in April 2025.
Faced with an avalanche of Roundup-related lawsuits following the acquisition of Monsanto, Bayer set aside more than $10 billion to pay potential damages in 2020, with that figure swelling even further in the intervening years.
In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded that glyphosate could “probably” cause cancer.
Too big to fail