A US federal court in Delaware has dismissed Onego Bio’s lawsuit against The EVERY Company, closing the last active case in a year-long dispute over a patent covering the production of ovalbumin, the main protein in egg white, through precision fermentation. The court declined to issue the declaratory judgment Onego had sought and made no ruling on whether the patent is valid or whether Onego infringes it.
Onego Bio, a 2022 spinout of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, filed suit in September 2025 seeking a declaratory judgment that it does not infringe EVERY’s US Patent No. 12,096,784, which it argued was invalid and unenforceable. A parallel case in Wisconsin was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds in May. Both companies produce ovalbumin through microbial fermentation, EVERY with yeast and Onego with the fungus Trichoderma reesei.
Onego had asked the court to declare that it does not infringe the ’784 patent, arguing that EVERY’s statements to investors amounted to a threat to sue. The court found no such threat. According to Onego’s own statement, the court concluded that EVERY “never took that sort of affirmative step to suggest that it was going to sue Onego or otherwise assert the ’784 Patent against it,” and described EVERY’s reported remarks to investors, even if made, as “forms of puffing rather than actual threats.”
Onego had alleged that EVERY told potential investors Onego would need a license. The company maintains that its Trichoderma technology is fundamentally different and that EVERY’s patent does not disclose how to make ovalbumin with it.
EVERY founder and CEO Arturo Elizondo gave a different account of how the dispute began, writing on LinkedIn: “Last year, Onego Bio reached out seeking a license to our patents. We declined. In turn, they filed two identical lawsuits seeking to invalidate them.”
With the US litigation closed, the open questions over EVERY’s patent family sit with patent offices in other markets. Onego says patent offices in Japan, Korea, Mexico and Europe have rejected or raised objections to applications in the same EVERY patent family, proceedings it says it will continue to follow.
Onego, which runs its commercial headquarters in San Diego and is planning a production facility in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, says it is now selling its Bioalbumen egg protein to US customers. EVERY, founded as Clara Foods in 2014, has been on the market with its own precision-fermented egg proteins for several years.
Maija Itkonen, CEO and co-founder of Onego Bio, stated, “Our team is busy shipping metric tons of Bioalbumen® and selling to U.S. customers, and the response has been incredible. Our focus is on commercialization, which I’m sure is what EVERY is focused on too. We respect what they have built over 12 years. There is room for more than one strong company in this category, and customers benefit from having a choice, because true competition will grow the market.”
