Pharmaceutical regulatory filing citing a Nature paper — Moleculin Biotech, 2020-06-16
Moleculin BiotechMoleculin BiotechNASDAQ MBRX
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in Nature in its regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Regulator · Website as a basis for its claims. The company read the way it wrote the paper and the scope the paper actually showed in order. The stock price movement for one month after the filing was compared to past cases of the same type to determine where it stood. 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 shareholders, it submits a 8-K to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The item numbers of the document submitted by Moleculin Biotech on 2020-06-16 were 8.01 Other Events · 9.01 Financial Statements and Exhibits. The company cited a paper published in Nature in the attached press release. If the sentence citing the paper is translated verbatim, it reads as follows:
In this regard, an unedited version of an article that has now been accepted for publication in the scientific journal, Nature (Bojkova, D. et al. Proteomics of SARS-CoV-2-infected host cells reveals therapy targets, Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2332-7 2020), reports that one of the therapeutic targets in SARS-CoV-2 is glycolysis.
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 mentioned in the abstract is limited to this.
The paper's title is Proteomics of SARS-CoV-2-infected host cells reveals therapy targets and it was published in Nature on 2020-05-14. The authors are affiliated with Goethe University Frankfurt, University Hospital Frankfurt, German Center for Infection Research, and Cardio-Pulmonary Institute. The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. What this article read is only up to that point. This 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 is an experimental study that scanned for protein changes in host cells infected with the coronavirus to find treatment targets. It is a cell experiment. It is not the result of human patients.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full paper and the appendix. This article, which has not gone 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 made 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 | +8.1% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the filing | −5.1% | On the filing day or the first trading day after |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | −13.8% | One week |
| +1 to +20 trading days cumulative | +0.7% | 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 +0.7% in this case is within the bottom 67% of the 142 samples and is within 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% | +0.7% |
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. 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, and it is placed together in the table below.
| Disclosure date | the academic journal of the paper | one month excess return |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-03-09 | European Journal of Cancer | −18.2% |
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, so one can determine whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract by the number. The specific event is read in the original text of each link.
- 2020-06-17 8-K Item 5.02, 5.07 — Officer and Director Changes, Results of Shareholder Meeting
- 2020-06-25 8-K Item 7.01, 9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · financial statements · exhibits
- 2020-07-01 8-K Item 7.01, 9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · financial statements · exhibits
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only abstracts, cannot answer how the paper reviewed what methods and what it showed up to which point. How many times the paper cited by the company was cited afterward can be rechecked 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.
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 the company alone by 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 amount to roughly a 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.