Pharmaceutical regulatory filing citing a PLoS ONE paper — Tonix Pharmaceuticals, 2018-01-22
Tonix PharmaceuticalsTonix PharmaceuticalsNASDAQ TNXP
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in PLoS ONE in a 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 manner in which it wrote the paper and the actual scope of 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 retrospective 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, the report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission is called 8-K. The item number of the document submitted by Tonix Pharmaceuticals on 2018-01-22 was 7.01 Reg FD public · 9.01 financial statements · attached documents. The company cited a paper published in PLoS ONE in the attached press release. If you copy the sentence citing the paper verbatim from the original, it reads as follows.
Emerging Infectious Diseases (2009) www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 15, No. 7 6 Engler RJM et al., PloS ONE (2015) 10(3): e0118283. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0118283 57 © 2018 Tonix Pharmaceuticals Holding Corp. HSPV074 – fragmented homolog of VACV I4L (ribonucleotide reductase) HSPV200 – 216 kDa protein probably regulates T - cell activation with homologs still present in variola , cowpox, and monkeypox viruses HPXV and its Relationship to Other Orthopoxviruses Evans, D.
What the reader should first look at is where the company placed the paper in the press release. The next is to determine whether the paper supports the entire company's 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 answer it.
The scope of the paper mentioned in the abstract is up to here.
The title of the paper is Construction of an infectious horsepox virus vaccine from chemically synthesized DNA fragments and it was published in PLoS ONE on 2018-01-19. The authors' affiliations are University of Alberta · Tonix Pharmaceuticals (United States). The summary published at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article only read up to there. This paragraph was rewritten by a person after filtering a draft written by a machine reading the abstract by numerical comparison, so it is a different grade from a full-text reading and original judgment.
It is an experiment that revived an extinct horsepox virus using chemically synthesized DNA fragments and created a smallpox vaccine candidate. The starting point is the long-standing record that Jenner's vaccine came from horses and the analysis that modern vaccine viruses share an ancestor with horsepox. Ten large DNA fragments were synthesized and joined inside cells, and the base sequence of the completed virus was confirmed to match the design. This virus had lower toxicity than existing vaccines in mice and prevented fatal infections.
The abstract does not answer; it remains in the main text and the appendix. This text, which does not go there, leaves the blank as it is. Readers compare the two citations above to determine which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the excerpt cited by the company.
One month later, the stock price was within the middle half of the sample.
The return excluding the portion attributable to movement with the overall market is called excess return. Dates are recorded as trading days, counting only the days the stock market is open. In terms of the calendar, 20 trading days are approximately one month. The excess return on the day of the regulatory filing and for the following month are presented in the table below.
| Period | Excess return relative to the market | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 5 trading days before the filing | −0.4% | The extent to which it had already moved before the filing |
| regulatory filing day | +5.4% | filing day or first trading day thereafter |
| +1~+5 trading day cumulative | +6.7% | one week |
| +1~+20 trading day cumulative | −15.3% | 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 -15.3% in this case is within the bottom 35% 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% | −6.9% | +5.5% | +19.5% | −15.3% |
Half of the sample falls between the two middle marks in the table. Check in the table whether this case falls inside or outside of 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 to apply to future cases.
The same company had 23 additional cases where papers were mentioned in 8-K filings, which are listed together in the table below.
| Filing date | The journal of the paper | Excess return in one month |
|---|---|---|
| 2020-12-04 | Genome biology | +20.9% |
| 2020-12-23 | Genome biology | +32.1% |
| 2021-11-23 | JCI Insight | −11.5% |
| 2021-12-14 | JCI Insight | −23.9% |
| 2022-01-04 | JCI Insight | −38.1% |
| 2022-01-11 | JCI Insight | −31.8% |
| 2022-03-14 | Nature Structural & Molecular Biology | −9.3% |
| 2022-04-06 | Public health reviews | −29.0% |
After the filing, the company issued this document
Three 8-K filings issued by the company after the filing date are listed with only item numbers. In 8-K filings without titles, the item numbers indicate the type of content, so it is possible to determine whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract. The details of what occurred are read in the original text of each link.
- 2018-01-23 8-K Item 7.01,9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · Financial statements · Attached documents
- 2018-02-15 8-K Item 5.02,9.01 — Executive · Director changes · Financial statements · Attached documents
- 2018-03-12 8-K Item 2.02, 9.01 — Earnings Announcement · Financial Statements · Attached Documents
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only abstracts, cannot answer what the paper reviewed, how it was done, or what it showed. How often the paper cited by the company was cited afterward can be checked again using the citation count from OpenAlexOpenAlex
Data source · Website. 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. The type is indicated 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 by removing the portion where the market as a whole rose or fell.
- Trading day
- A count of days when the stock market is open. Since weekends and holidays are excluded, 20 trading days correspond to roughly 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 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 or limitations of the method.