Pharmaceutical regulatory filing citing a Genome biology paper — Tonix Pharmaceuticals, 2020-12-04

Tonix PharmaceuticalsTonix PharmaceuticalsNASDAQ TNXP
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in Genome biology 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's manner of writing the paper and the actual scope of the paper were read in order. The stock price movement for one month after the filing was compared to past cases of the same type to determine its position. 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, it submits a current report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, called 8-K. The item numbers of the document submitted by Tonix Pharmaceuticals on 2020-12-04 were 8.01 Other Events · 9.01 Financial Statements and Exhibits. The company cited a paper published in Genome biology in the attached press release. Translating the sentence in the original document that cites the paper verbatim, it reads as follows.

The publication in the Journal Genome Biology , entitled “Re-assembly of 19th-century smallpox vaccine genomes reveals the contemporaneous use of horsepox and horsepox-related viruses in the United States” 1 analyzed sequences of U.S. smallpox vaccines that had been published recently by a different group also in Genome Biology , entitled “The origins and genomic diversity of American Civil War Era smallpox vaccine strains” 2 .

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's claim or only 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 extent.

The title of the paper is Re-assembly of nineteenth-century smallpox vaccine genomes reveals the contemporaneous use of horsepox and horsepox-related viruses in the USA and it was published in Genome biology on 2020-12-01. The authors' affiliations are Robert Koch Institute · Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro · Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro · University of Maryland, Baltimore. The summary published at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. What this article has read is only up to there. This paragraph was rewritten by a person after filtering a draft written by a machine reading the abstract through numerical comparison, so it is of a different grade from a full-text reading and a verified reading.

This is a short paper reassembling the genome of a 19th-century smallpox vaccine. Previous research had decoded the genomes of five old vaccine strains, but because it did not provide information from the ends of the genomes, it was difficult to determine the evolutionary relationships between the vaccine viruses. The authors reassembled the data and showed that the structures at the ends differ, and confirmed that one of them is the real vaccinia virus. The conclusion is that in the 19th century, vaccinia and its related viruses were used together as smallpox vaccines. This is not a paper discussing the effectiveness of modern vaccines.

What the abstract does not answer remains in the full text and the appendix. This article stops short of going there and leaves the gaps as they are. Readers are to judge for themselves which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the excerpt cited by the company, by comparing the two citations above.

One month later, the stock price was in the top quarter of the sample.

The portion of returns not explained by market movement is called excess return. Dates are counted in trading days, meaning only the days when the stock market is open. In terms of the calendar, 20 trading days are about a month. The excess return on the day of the filing and for the following month are listed in the table below.

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 +20.9% in this case is in the top quarter, corresponding to the 91% percentile among 142 samples counted from the bottom.

Half of the sample falls between the two central marks on the chart. One checks the chart to see whether this case lies within or outside the 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.

There are 23 additional cases where the same company cited a paper in an 8-K, which are included in the table below.

Documents issued by the company after the disclosure

Only the item numbers of the three 8-K filings issued by the company after the disclosure date are listed. In 8-K filings without titles, the item number indicates the type of content. One can determine whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract based on the number. The specific event is described in the original text accessible via each link.

• 2020-12-07 8-K Items 7.01, 8.01, 9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · Other events · Financial statements and exhibits
• 2020-12-08 8-K Item 7.01, 9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · financial statements · exhibits
• 2020-12-14 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, what results, and to what extent. 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.