Regulatory filing by diagnostic lab citing medRxiv paper — SERA Prognostics, 2023-09-25
SERA PrognosticsSERA PrognosticsNASDAQ SERA
Filings SEC · Quote Google cited a paper published on medRxiv in a regulatory filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Regulator · Website as the basis for its claims. The company read the way it wrote the paper and the actual scope the paper demonstrated 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 was written in the press release as follows:
When a U.S. listed company has something to inform its shareholders, it files a continuing report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, called 8-K. The item numbers of the document filed by SERA Prognostics on 2023-09-25 were 7.01 Reg FD disclosure and 9.01 financial statements·attached documents. The company cited a paper published in medRxiv in the press release attached to it. If the sentence citing the paper is translated verbatim, it reads as follows.
Neonatal outcomes after proteomic biomarker-guided intervention: the AVERT PRETERM TRIAL. medRxiv 2023.09.13.23295503; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.09.13.23295503 NMI = Neonatal Composite Morbidity & Mortality Index ©2023 Sera Prognostics, Inc.
What a 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 entire company claim or only a part of it. To answer the latter question, one must read the full paper. This article only reads the abstract and cannot answer that question.
The scope of the paper discussed in the abstract is limited to this.
The paper's title is Neonatal outcomes after maternal biomarker-guided preterm birth intervention: the AVERT PRETERM trial and it was published in medRxiv on 2023-09-14. The authors are affiliated with Christiana Hospital, Walker (United States), and University of California, Irvine. The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article only reads up to that point. This paragraph was written by a person after filtering a draft generated by a machine through numerical comparison, and thus it is of a different grade than a full reading of the paper.
This article was published on medRxiv, a preprint server. It is a trial that administered preventive treatment to pregnant women who tested positive on a blood test measuring preterm birth risk, for those deemed to have low clinical risk. Women were tested around week 20 of pregnancy, and if positive, they were given progesterone and low-dose aspirin daily. Nurses called twice a week. The design compared with usual care received by past patients under the same criteria, and since it was not a randomized assignment, it could not eliminate differences due to time.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full paper and its appendices. This article leaves the blanks as they are. Readers should determine themselves which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the cited section cited by the company, by comparing the two citations above.
One month later, the stock price was within the upper 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 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 | +3.9% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the filing | +1.8% | On the filing day or the first trading day thereafter |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | +13.0% | One week |
| Cumulative +1~+20 trading days | +7.5% | 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 +7.5% in this case is in the top quarter, corresponding to the 78% position 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% | −7.4% | +5.5% | +19.5% | +7.5% |
Half of the sample falls between the two central marks in the chart. One checks from the chart whether this case lies 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 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 | excess return for one month |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-01-08 | Pregnancy | −30.0% |
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, 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.
- 2023-11-08 8-K Item 2.02, 9.01 — Earnings announcement · Financial statements · Attached documents
- 2023-12-06 8-K Item 7.01, 9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · Financial statements · Exhibits
- 2023-12-12 8-K Item 1.01 — Material contract execution
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only abstracts, cannot answer how the paper re-examined what and showed up to where. 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.
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 after removing the portion attributable to 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.