Corteva and Inari Settle Seed IP Lawsuit With Material Destruction and Licensing Talks

Corteva and Inari have settled a seed intellectual property lawsuit that had been pending in federal court since 2023, ending a dispute over access to deposited seed material and edited versions of Corteva genetic events.

Under the settlement, Inari has agreed to destroy Corteva material it accessed from seed depositories as well as material developed from those deposits.

Inari will also assign to Corteva intellectual property related to its edited versions of Corteva events, according to the joint announcement issued by the companies.

The two companies have additionally agreed to negotiate certain licensing arrangements. Other financial and commercial terms of the settlement remain confidential.

The dispute was closely watched because modern seed development increasingly combines patented traits, biological material held in formal depositories, genomics, machine learning and gene editing.

Corteva and Inari said patent and plant variety protection systems play an important role in sustaining investment and competition, and both acknowledged the need to follow applicable laws and contracts governing deposited material.

The settlement resolves the specific lawsuit without eliminating competition between the companies. Inari continues to develop broadacre crop products through its SEEDesign platform, while Corteva remains a major global seed and crop protection supplier.

For agricultural biotechnology, the case underlines that access to biological deposits does not remove the contractual and intellectual property obligations attached to commercial seed traits, an issue likely to become more important as gene editing becomes more widely used.