Pharmaceutical filing citing Cell paper — Immunome, 2021-03-29
In a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Regulator · Website, ImmunomeImmunomeNASDAQ IMNM
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in Cell as the basis for its claims. The company read the manner in which it wrote the paper and the actual scope presented in the paper in sequence. It described where the stock price movement over the following month compared to past similar cases. This is a hindsight judgment written after knowing the results. The paper was read only up to the abstract.
The disclosure was written in the press release as follows:
When a U.S. listed company has something to inform shareholders, it submits a 8-K to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The item number of the document submitted by Immunome on 2021-03-29 was 7.01 Reg FD disclosure · 9.01 financial statements · exhibits. The company cited a paper published in Cell in the attached press release. If the sentence citing the paper is translated verbatim, it reads as follows:
Harnessing the Human Memory B Cell Response To Develop Antibody - Based Therapeutics March 29, 2021 Immunome, Inc. 665 Stockton Drive, Suite 300 | Exton, PA 19341 610.321.3700 | www.immunome.com 2 Copyright © 2021 Immunome, Inc.
What readers should first check is where the company placed the paper in the press release. Next, they should determine whether the paper supports the entire company claim or only a 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 to that.
The scope of the paper discussed in the abstract is limited to this.
The paper's title is Multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants escape neutralization by vaccine-induced humoral immunity and it was published in Cell on 2021-03-12. The authors are affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital · Massachusetts General Hospital · Ragon Institute of MGH, MITMassachusetts Institute of Technology
University · United States · Website and Harvard · Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology. The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article only read up to that point. The paragraph was rewritten by a person after filtering a draft written by a machine through numerical comparison, so it is of a different grade than a full reading of the paper.
The abstract of this paper is not publicly available, so it was not summarized. What can be understood from the title is that it discusses experimental results showing that several variants of COVID-19 evade the neutralizing effect of antibodies produced by vaccines. Details about which variants were tested with which antibodies are in the main text.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full text and appendices. This article, which did not go beyond that, leaves the blanks as they are. Readers should compare the two citations above to determine which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the citation provided by 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 calendar terms, 20 trading days are 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 | −7.9% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the filing | −2.1% | On the filing day or the first trading day thereafter |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | −3.9% | One week |
| Cumulative +1~+20 trading days | −7.1% | 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 −7.1% in this case is in the middle half, corresponding to the 50% from the bottom among 142 cases in the sample.
| 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% | −7.1% | +5.5% | +19.5% | −7.1% |
Half of the sample falls between the two central marks in the chart. One checks from the chart whether this case lies within or outside of it. 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 is one additional case where the same company wrote a paper in 8-K, so it is placed together in the table below.
| Disclosure date | the journal of the paper | a month's excess return |
|---|---|---|
| 2021-04-26 | Cell | −37.8% |
after the filing, the company issued such documents
after the filing date, the company issued three 8-K filings. Here, only the item numbers are listed. In 8-K filings without titles, the item numbers indicate the type of content, as the numbers specify whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract. The details of what occurred are read in the original text of each link.
- 2021-04-20 8-K Item 5.02, 9.01 — Changes in Officers and Directors · Financial Statements and Exhibits
- 2021-04-26 8-K Item 7.01,9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · Financial statements · Exhibits
- 2021-04-26 8-K Item 1.01,3.02,8.01,9.01 — Material contract execution · Unregistered securities sale · Other events · Financial statements · Exhibits
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only abstracts, cannot answer how the paper re-examined what method and showed up to where. How many times the paper cited by the company has been cited afterward can be rechecked through OpenAlexOpenAlex
Data source · Website citation counts. The next 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 types are indicated by item numbers such as earnings, contracts, and executive changes. All the 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 the company alone after removing the portion where the market as a whole rises or falls.
- 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 within it 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.