BioCentury
ARTICLE | Company News

Rhone-Poulenc Agro, DeKalb, Monsanto agbio/veterinary/environmental news

April 15, 2013 7:00 AM UTC

Rhone-Poulenc Agro filed suit in the U.S. District Court in the Middle District of North Carolina against DKB and Monsanto for alleged misuse of Rhone-Poulenc genetic material. The suit is in anticipation of Monsanto's introduction of Roundup Ready corn seed. Rhone-Poulenc is also asserting that Monsanto's Roundup Ready corn seed infringes two of its U.S. patents - Nos. 5,510,471 and 5,633,448 - covering the optimized transit peptides and herbicide tolerant gene sequences that provide glyphosate tolerance in the Roundup Ready corn seed.

At the core of the dispute are technologies that Rhone-Poulenc provided to DKB as part of a December 1994 license agreement. That agreement granted DKB a royalty-free right to use glyphosate-tolerant germplasm. However, Rhone-Poulenc asserts that there was no intention to enable DKB to sell or transfer the genes for inclusion in other companies' germplasm or to transfer the technology to a competitor. Rhone-Poulenc alleges that Monsanto has no license to the Rhone-Poulenc technology relating to glyphosate tolerant genes or Rhone-Poulenc's patents. ...