Less than one month after he was appointed as chief financial officer of Moderna, Jorge Gomez abruptly departed the company due to an ongoing investigation at his former company.
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Less than one month after he was appointed as chief financial officer of Moderna and only one day after he started his new role, Jorge Gomez abruptly departed the company.
This morning, Cambridge, Mass.-based Moderna announced that the decision for Gomez’s departure was based on disclosure from his previous employer, Dentsply Sirona Inc., of an ongoing internal investigation into certain matters, including financial reporting.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Dentsply Sirona said it was unable to file its quarterly financial report due to the internal financial investigation. According to the filing, the N.C.-based dental supply company’s internal audit committee is investigating the use of incentives to sell products to distributors last year. Those incentives may not have been properly accounted for, the company said.
The committee is also investigating whether or not those financial incentives were used at the direction of Dentsply senior management to achieve executive compensation targets in 2021. A forensic accounting firm is being brought in to investigate the issue, Dentsply Sirona said in its filing.
Following that disclosure, Gomez departed Moderna. David Meline, who was retiring as CFO of Moderna, will remain with the company in that role while the company begins a new search for his replacement. Meline joined Moderna in 2020, one year after retiring from Amgen, in order to help Moderna become commercial-ready with its mRNA vaccine.
Moderna announced Gomez was joining its leadership team in April. At the time of the announcement, Moderna Chief Executive Officer Stephane Bancel said Gomez would be an asset to the company as it continues to scale and expand its mRNA programs. In addition to his tenure at Dentsply Sirona, Gomez spent 13 years at Cardinal Health in the CFO role. Prior to Cardinal Health, Gomez held positions of financial and business leadership at General Motors, including in New York City, Singapore, Belgium, and Brazil.
For Moderna, the CFO snafu comes at a time the company continues to fend off patent challenges over the lipid nanoparticle delivery system used in its COVID-19 vaccine, Spikevax. Earlier this week, Moderna moved to dismiss charges brought against it earlier this year by Arbutus Biopharma Corporation and Genevant Sciences. In a statement on Monday, Moderna said the claims brought by the two companies are unfounded and added that the company’s Spikevax vaccine does not infringe on any valid patents.
Moderna said it is seeking to have the claims against it dismissed because the two companies should have sued the U.S. government instead of Moderna. Under U.S. law, claims against government-contracted suppliers must be filed against the U.S. government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Moderna said.
“This law provides an important statutory protection for authorized government suppliers and played a critical role in encouraging companies, including Moderna, to step up and help the Government fight the COVID-19 pandemic,” Moderna said in a statement.
In addition to Genevant and Arbutus, Moderna has had to fight patent infringement claims from Alnylam and also attempted to fend off patent challenges from the National Institutes of Health before settling in December.
