Pharmaceutical filing citing a New England Journal of Medicine paper — Cytokinetics, 2024-05-13
CytokineticsCytokineticsNASDAQ CYTK
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine 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 the paper actually demonstrated in sequence. It recorded where the stock price movement over the following month compared to past cases of the same type. This is a hindsight 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 shareholders, it files a 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The item numbers of the document filed by Cytokinetics on 2024-05-13 were 8.01 Other Events · 9.01 Financial Statements and Exhibits. The company cited a paper published in New England Journal of Medicine in the attached press release. If the sentence citing the paper is translated verbatim, it reads as follows:
Aficamten for Symptomatic Obstructive Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy. N Engl J Med.
What the reader should first check is where the company placed the paper in the press release. Next, the reader 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 has read only the abstract, cannot provide an answer.
The scope of the paper discussed in the abstract is limited to this.
The paper's title is Aficamten for Symptomatic Obstructive Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy and it was published in New England Journal of Medicine on 2024-05-13. The authors are affiliated with the Baim Institute for Clinical Research. The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article has read only up to this point. The paragraph was written by a person after filtering out a draft generated by a machine reading the abstract by numerical comparison, so it is of a different grade from a full reading of the paper.
It is a phase 3 trial administering the cardiac myosin inhibitor aficamten to adult patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy who have symptoms, over 24 weeks. This disease causes narrowed blood flow from the left ventricle, increasing heart pressure and making exercise difficult. Participants were randomly assigned to real drug or placebo, and echocardiograms were examined. Dosage was adjusted. The result figures are in the latter part of the abstract. This article does not include that part.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full text and appendix. This article, which has not gone beyond the abstract, leaves the blanks as they are. Readers should compare the two citations above to determine which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the cited section from the company.
One month later, the stock price was within the middle half 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 trading day, counting only the days the stock market is open. In terms of the calendar, 20 trading days are approximately one 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 | −5.7% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the filing | −7.2% | On the filing day or the first trading day after |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | −5.3% | One week |
| Cumulative +1~+20 trading days | −5.4% | 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 -5.4% in this case is within the bottom 53% of the 142 samples, placing it in the lower half.
| 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% | −5.4% |
Half of the sample falls between the two central marks in the chart. One checks from the chart whether this case falls inside or outside. The sample collects cases where U.S. listed companies wrote papers in 8-K over the past ten years. The company itself is excluded from the sample. The numbers written here are past facts, not rules to apply to the next case.
There are two more cases where the same company wrote papers in 8-K, and they are placed together in the table below.
| Disclosure date | the journal of the paper | a month's excess return |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-09-03 | Journal of the American College of Cardiology | +6.7% |
| 2025-09-08 | Journal of the American College of Cardiology | +9.8% |
after the filing, the company issued such documents
after the filing date, the company issued three 8-K filings. Only the item numbers are listed here. In 8-K filings without titles, the item numbers indicate the type of content. Whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract can be identified by the number. The details of what occurred are read in the original text of each link.
- 2024-05-17 8-K Items 5.02, 5.07, 9.01 — Executive and director changes, shareholder meeting results, financial statements and attached documents
- 2024-05-22 8-K Item 8.01, 9.01 — Other Events · Financial Statements · Exhibits
- 2024-05-22 8-K Items 1.01,2.01,2.03 — Material Contract Execution · Asset Acquisition/Disposal Completion · Debt Incurrence
What This Article Does Not Answer
This article, which reads only abstracts, cannot answer how the paper re-examined what method and to what extent. How many times the paper cited by the company was cited afterward can be rechecked through the OpenAlexOpenAlex
Data source · Website citation count. The next thing to look at is whether the company's next 8-K again cites the same paper.
Term explanation
- 8-K
- A periodic report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission when a listed company in the United States has something to inform its shareholders. The type is indicated by item numbers such as earnings, contracts, and executive changes. All events in this article are derived from this document.
- Excess return
- The remainder obtained by subtracting the overall market return from the stock return. It is used to observe the movement of this company alone, excluding the portion influenced by the overall market fluctuation.
- Trading day
- A date counted only on days when the stock market is open. Since weekends and holidays are excluded, 20 trading days correspond to approximately 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
- A summary 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 and limitations of the method.