Pharmaceutical filing citing a Journal of the American College of Cardiology paper — Amarin \UK, 2019-05-01
Amarin UK cited a paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology as the basis for its claims in a regulatory filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Regulator · Website. The company read the manner in which it wrote the paper and the scope it actually demonstrated in sequence. It described where the stock price movement over the following month compared to past cases of the same type. This is a retrospective judgment written after knowing the results. The paper was read only up to the abstract.
The disclosure is written in the press release as follows:
When a U.S. listed company has something to inform its shareholders, the form it files with the Securities and Exchange Commission is called 8-K. Amarin UK's item number in the document filed on 2019-05-01 was 2.02 Earnings Release · 9.01 Financial Statements·Attached Documents. The company cited a paper published in Journal of the American College of Cardiology in the press release attached to it. If the sentence citing the paper is translated verbatim, it reads as follows.
Recurrent event analyses for the total primary endpoint events and for the total key secondary endpoint in REDUCE-IT as published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology9 were conducted using a series of statistical models.
The reader should first check where the company placed the paper in the press release. Next, they should determine whether the paper supports the company's entire claim or only part of it. To answer the latter question, one must read the full paper. This article, which only read the abstract, cannot provide an answer.
The scope of the paper discussed in the abstract is limited to this.
The paper's title is Effects of Icosapent Ethyl on Total Ischemic Events, and it was published in Journal of the American College of Cardiology on 2019-03-18. The authors are affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital · Harvard University · Inserm · Délégation Paris 7. The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article only read up to that point. The paragraph was written by a person after filtering a machine-generated draft by numerical comparison, and thus differs in quality from a full reading of the paper.
This is an additional analysis of a large trial involving 8,179 high-risk cardiovascular patients with high triglycerides who were taking statins. While the previous analysis only looked at the time to the first event, this one counted all events that recurred in the same patients. The group taking four grams daily of prescription omega-3 formulation had fewer overall ischemic events than the placebo group. Although this is a pre-specified additional analysis, it redefines the primary endpoint, so caution is needed in interpretation.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full text and appendices. This article, which did not go beyond the abstract, leaves gaps as they are. Readers should compare the two citations above to determine which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the excerpt cited by the company.
One month later, the stock price was within the top quartile of the sample.
The remaining return, after subtracting the portion that moves with the overall market, is called excess return. The date is written as a trading day, counting only the days the stock market is open. In calendar terms, 20 trading days is about a month. The excess return for the day of the regulatory filing and the following month are listed in the table below.
| Period | Excess return relative to the market | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Five trading days before the filing | +1.7% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the filing | −5.6% | On the filing day or the first trading day thereafter |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | −6.0% | One week |
| Cumulative +1~+20 trading days | +10.5% | One month |
A bundle of past cases of the same type is called a sample. The position counted from the bottom is expressed as a percentile. The one-month excess return of +10.5% in this case is in the top quarter, corresponding to the 83% position from the bottom among 142 samples.
| Sample scale (20 trading days) | Tenth from the bottom | Fourth from the bottom | median | top 25% | top 10% | This case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Excess return | −31.9% | −20.1% | −7.4% | +5.5% | +19.5% | +10.5% |
Half of the sample falls between the two central marks on the chart. One checks from the chart whether this case lies within or outside that range. The sample collects cases where U.S.-listed companies cited papers in 8-K filings over the past ten years. The company itself is excluded from the sample. The numbers listed here are past facts, not rules to apply to future cases.
After the disclosure, the company issued such documents
After the disclosure date, the company issued three 8-K filings, listed here only by item number. In 8-K filings without titles, the item number indicates the type of content. One can determine whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract based on that number. The nature of the event is read in the original text of each link.
- 2019-05-23 8-K Item 5.07 — Results of the Shareholders' Meeting
- 2019-05-29 8-K Item 8.01, 9.01 — Other Events · Financial Statements · Exhibits
- 2019-07-02 8-K Item 2.02, 9.01 — Earnings Announcement · Financial Statements · Attached Documents
What this article does not answer
This article, based only on the abstract, does not answer what the paper reviewed, by what method, and to what extent. How often the paper cited by the company was cited afterward can be verified again through the OpenAlexOpenAlex
Data source · Website citation count. What will be seen next is whether the company's next 8-K again cites the same paper.
Glossary
- 8-K
- A voluntary report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission when a U.S. listed company has news to inform shareholders. Types are indicated by item numbers such as earnings, contracts, and executive changes. All events in this article come from this document.
- Excess return
- The remainder after subtracting the overall market return from the stock return. It is used to observe the movement of the company alone by removing the portion where the market as a whole rises or falls.
- Trading day
- A date counting only the days when the stock market is open. Since weekends and holidays are excluded, 20 trading days correspond to roughly one calendar month.
- Sample and percentile
- A bundle of past cases of the same type is a sample, and the position from the bottom is expressed as a percentile. A percentile of 10 means that nine out of ten cases performed better than this case.
- Abstract
- An abstract is placed at the beginning of a paper. The author writes in a few sentences what was done, how it was done, and what results were obtained. Without reading the full text, one cannot know the details or limitations of the methods.