The Ovalbumin Patent Fight and What It Tells Us About Where Precision Fermentation Is Going

By | May 22, 2026
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If you have been watching the precision fermentation space for any length of time, you will know that the most interesting fights right now are not really about science or scale-up. They are about intellectual property. The latest chapter is the ongoing dispute between The Every Company and Onego Bio over recombinant ovalbumin, and it has just escalated in a way that should make every founder, investor and engineer in this sector pay attention.

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For context, both companies make ovalbumin, the main protein in egg white, through precision fermentation. The Every Company uses an engineered strain of Komagataella phaffii, which most of us still call Pichia pastoris out of habit. Onego Bio, which was spun out of Finland’s VTT in 2022, uses the filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei. Two completely different production hosts, the same end product.

The disagreement is over US patent 12,096,784, which The Every Company holds. The patent does not just cover ovalbumin production in yeast. It is drafted broadly enough to cover expression of ovalbumin across a wide range of microbial hosts, which is why a company using a fungus rather than a yeast finds itself on the wrong end of an infringement claim.

What has actually happened in court

Onego Bio filed suit in Wisconsin in September 2025, asking the court to invalidate the patent and accusing The Every Company of fraud and tortious interference with its investor relationships. A federal judge dismissed that case earlier this month on jurisdictional grounds. Neither party is incorporated in Wisconsin, and the same arguments are already being litigated in Delaware, where both companies are registered.

Days after the Wisconsin dismissal, The Every Company filed a motion in Delaware asking the court to sanction Onego Bio for what it describes as improper duplicative litigation based on knowingly false factual allegations. They want the Delaware case dismissed with prejudice and monetary sanctions against Onego Bio and its counsel. Onego Bio has responded, and the company says in court filings that it has independent third-party testing on commercially purchased OvoBoost and OvoPro showing amino acid extensions that are not present in natural egg protein. Onego claims this directly contradicts sworn statements made by The Every Company’s chief of staff. There is a similar disagreement about whether The Every Company’s CEO communicated with Onego investors about the patent dispute, with Onego saying it has sworn declarations from a named investor confirming those conversations took place.

Court filings also reveal that the two companies actually discussed a potential merger before the IP relationship went sideways. That detail is worth sitting with for a moment. A merger discussion usually involves quite detailed technical disclosure on both sides, and once that has happened, you cannot really unhappen it.

Meanwhile in Europe

While all of that is going on in the US, VTT, the Finnish research organisation that originally spun Onego Bio out, has filed an opposition against The Every Company’s European patent at the European Patent Office. The argument from VTT is that the European patent really only enables ovalbumin production in Pichia pastoris in a meaningful way, and that the expertise to express ovalbumin in Trichoderma reesei was already in the public domain before The Every Company filed. VTT points to public presentations going back to 2016, including a talk by Dr Dilek Ercili-Cura at IFT in New Orleans in 2019, which described exactly the recombinant expression of ovalbumin in T. reesei that the patent is now trying to cover. If that argument holds up, the European patent in its current form is in real trouble.

Why this matters for the rest of us

Now, why does any of this matter to bioreactor engineers and people building this industry? The patent question here is not abstract. It goes to the heart of how broadly we should be allowed to protect a recombinant protein production claim. If you have done the work to engineer one specific host, say a yeast, to express a target protein and you have characterised the titer, the post-translational modifications and the downstream processing, you have made a real contribution. Whether that earns you a patent that locks out anyone using a totally different host organism, with completely different secretion machinery, glycosylation pathways and process economics, is a much bigger question. The host matters enormously. A T. reesei process and a K. phaffii process share almost nothing in common at the bioreactor level beyond the fact that both involve aerobic submerged fermentation. Feed strategies, oxygen demand, foaming behaviour, shear sensitivity, downstream capture, all of it is different.

There is also the bioidentity question. Onego Bio’s claim that The Every Company’s product contains amino acid extensions not present in natural egg protein is interesting because if it holds up, it complicates the marketing position of a product that is sold as bioidentical to egg white ovalbumin. From a process development perspective this is not particularly surprising. When you express any recombinant protein in any host, you have to make decisions about signal peptides, propeptide cleavage, and secretion tags. Sometimes those decisions leave residues behind. The question is how much that matters functionally, and how it is communicated to customers and regulators who may treat a residual N-terminal extension as the difference between a bioidentical and a genetically modified variant.

The commercial dynamic, which is the real story

This is not the first time we have seen this pattern. The Impossible Foods versus Motif FoodWorks dispute over heme proteins ended last year with a settlement in which Motif sold its heme business to Impossible Foods, and days later announced it was shutting down entirely. The lawsuit, even though it was eventually settled, achieved what it set out to achieve commercially. Large risk-averse customers do not want to buy ingredients from a company that is in active patent litigation, because the supply chain risk is just too high. So even a patent claim that might not survive a full validity challenge can effectively foreclose a competitor from the market while the case drags on for years. That is a real concern for a sector that is already capital constrained.

This is what people are referring to when they talk about precision fermentation maturing. We are now at the point where multiple companies are bringing genuinely commercial products to market with overlapping technologies, and the IP framework is starting to be tested at full pressure. The Every Company has raised over 230 million dollars and is talking about profitable unit economics. Onego Bio has raised 75 million dollars and is setting up large-scale manufacturing in Wisconsin. These are not paper companies. They are competing for the same customers, and now they are competing in court at the same time as they are competing in the market.

The resolution of the Delaware case, together with the EPO opposition, is going to set important precedents for the rest of us. If The Every Company’s broad host claim survives validity challenges, then anyone making any recombinant egg protein in any microbial system has to either license or design around. If the patent is narrowed to specific hosts, the field opens up considerably. Either outcome will tell us something about how much of the value in a precision fermentation company actually sits in the molecule versus in the process and the host engineering.

Where the real defensible value sits

My own view, as someone who spends most days thinking about bioreactor control, soft sensors and the machinery of actually running these processes at scale, is that the durable value increasingly sits in the process rather than in the molecule. Anyone who has spent time on an industrial scale fermentation knows that the gap between a strain that expresses a protein at lab scale and a fully optimised, instrumented and controlled production process at cubic metre scale is enormous. You can patent a sequence. You can patent a host. It is much harder, and more honest to the actual nature of the work, to acknowledge that the durable advantage is in the operational depth. The strains will eventually be commoditised. The bioreactor know-how, the soft sensor stacks, the model predictive controllers, the real-time data infrastructure, that is what separates a company that can scale from one that cannot, and none of it shows up neatly in a patent claim.

It is also worth saying that aggressive enforcement of broadly drafted process IP probably hurts the precision fermentation industry more than it helps any individual company. The Impossible versus Motif outcome shows you what happens. The lawsuit ran for two years, a 345 million dollar company shut down, and the customers who were nervous about heme variants from any supplier became more nervous about all of them. Investors took the same lesson. If the dominant strategy in this space becomes filing the broadest possible patent and then using litigation to slow down competitors rather than competing on cost, quality and reliability of supply, then we are going to spend the next decade litigating instead of scaling. That is not the industry I want to be working in, and I do not think it is the one that wins against the conventional food incumbents.

Watch this space. The next few months in Delaware and at the European Patent Office will shape how the rest of this decade plays out for everyone working in precision fermentation.

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