NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Bill Welch has resigned as Sequenom's president, CEO, and director "to pursue other interests," the company said today.
Dirk van den Boom is replacing him as interim president and CEO while retaining his role as chief scientific and strategy officer.
Welch became Sequenom's CEO just a year ago in June 2014, replacing Harry Hixson, who retired at the time. Welch had joined Sequenom in 2011 as senior vice president for diagnostics and became the company's president and COO in 2012.
Van den Boom became Sequenom's chief scientific and strategy officer in June 2014. Prior to that, he served as the firm's executive vice president for R&D and CSO, and before that, he was senior vice president for R&D and CTO. He joined Sequenom in 1998 at the company's Hamburg office in Germany. He holds a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of Hamburg.
In Monday morning trade on the Nasdaq, shares of Sequenom were down 5 percent at $2.27.