NEW YORK – T2 Biosystems has laid off substantially all its employees, fired its top executives, and reappointed those executives to part-time consulting roles.
In a document filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission last week, the Lexington, Massachusetts-based company said that its board of directors had approved the layoffs effective immediately and the company expected to incur charges of about $1.0 million in wages, severance payments, benefits, and earned vacation time.
T2 President and CEO John Sperzel, CFO John Sprague, and Senior VP and General Counsel Michael Gibbs were also released, effective immediately. However, the company reappointed them in those same positions as consultants.
Under the consulting agreements for 20 hours of services per week, Sperzel will be paid $276 per hour, Sprague will be paid $185 per hour, and Gibbs will be paid $188 per hour.
T2 also noted that it has canceled a planned March 3 special meeting of stockholders to approve a reverse stock split that was intended to bring the company into compliance with Nasdaq's minimum bid price requirement.
The Nasdaq Hearings Panel had decided days earlier to delist T2's common stock after the company failed to meet the exchange's requirements to maintain a minimum bid price of $1.00 per share and a minimum $35 million market value.
In the last year, T2 had announced plans to launch its T2Lyme disease panel as a laboratory-developed test, raised $8 million in a private placement, received US Food and Drug Administration clearance for pediatric use of a direct-from-blood test for Candida, and announced plans to out-license its proprietary T2 Magnetic Resonance technology for the detection of pathogens directly from whole blood.