Pharmaceutical filing citing a Nature Genetics paper — Regulus Therapeutics, 2021-10-18
Regulus TherapeuticsRegulus TherapeuticsUS RGLS
cited a paper published in Nature Genetics as a 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 actual scope demonstrated by the paper 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 wrote the paper in the press release like this
When a U.S. listed company has something to inform shareholders, it submits a current report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, called 8-K. The item numbers of the document submitted by Regulus Therapeutics on 2021-10-18 were 8.01 Other Events · 9.01 Financial Statements and Exhibits. The company cited a paper published in Nature Genetics in the attached press release. The sentence citing the paper, copied verbatim from the original, is as follows.
Unpublished Preliminary Data Sobolevsky et al.
What readers should first look at 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 has only read the abstract, cannot provide an answer.
The scope of the paper discussed in the abstract is limited to this.
The paper title is Renal plasticity revealed through reversal of polycystic kidney disease in mice and it was published in Nature Genetics on 2021-10-11. The authors are affiliated with Yale University. The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article has only read up to this point. The paragraph was written by a person after filtering a draft generated by a machine through numerical comparison, so it is of a different grade than a full-text reading and original judgment.
The abstract of this paper is not publicly available, so it cannot be summarized. What can be known from the title is that it is an experimental study showing that in mice with polycystic kidney disease, the kidneys were reversed and demonstrated the ability to self-repair. It is a report from the animal experiment stage, not results from human patients.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full text and appendices. 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 company's cited passage.
A month later, the stock price was within the middle half of the sample.
The return remaining 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 when the stock market is open. In terms of a calendar, 20 trading days are approximately one month. The excess return for the day of the regulatory filing and the following one month in this case are listed in the table below.
| Period | Excess return relative to the market | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 5 trading days before the filing | −31.4% | The extent already moved before the filing |
| Day of the filing | −0.4% | Day of filing or the first trading day after |
| +1~+5 trading days cumulative | −10.4% | One week |
| +1~+20 trading days cumulative | −18.3% | 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 -18.3% in this case is within the bottom 29% of the 142 cases in the sample, and it is within the lower half.
| Sample scale (20 trading days) | Tenth from the bottom | Fourth from the bottom | Median | Upper 25% | Upper 10% | This case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Excess return | −31.9% | −20.1% | −6.9% | +5.5% | +19.5% | −18.3% |
Half of the sample falls between the two middle marks in the table. Check from the table whether this case falls inside or outside that range. The sample consists of cases where U.S.-listed companies cited papers in 8-K filings over the past decade. The company itself is excluded from the sample. The numbers listed here are historical facts, not rules applicable to future cases.
After the disclosure, the company issued such documents.
List only the item numbers of the three 8-K filings issued by the company after the disclosure date. In 8-K filings without titles, the item number indicates the type of content. Whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract can be identified by that number. The specific event is read in the original text of each link.
- 2021-11-10 8-K Items 2.02, 9.01 — Earnings announcement · Financial statements · Attached documents
- 2021-11-24 8-K Items 1.01, 3.02, 9.01 — Significant contract signing · Unregistered securities sale · Financial statements · Attached documents
- 2021-11-30 8-K Items 5.03, 8.01, 9.01 — Bylaws amendment · Other events · Financial statements · Attached documents
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only abstracts, cannot answer how the paper reviewed what methods and to what extent. How many times the paper cited by the company has been 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.
Explanation of terms
- 8-K
- A voluntary report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission when a U.S. listed company has something to inform shareholders. It is categorized 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 see the movement of this company alone after removing the portion where the market as a whole rose or fell.
- 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 about a month on the calendar.
- 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 was found. Without reading the full text, one cannot know the details and limitations of the method.