Pharmaceutical regulatory filing citing a Nature Structural & Molecular Biology paper — Tonix Pharmaceuticals, 2022-03-14
Tonix PharmaceuticalsTonix PharmaceuticalsNASDAQ TNXP
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology in its regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Regulator · Website. The company's manner of writing about 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. This is a hindsight 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 its shareholders, the form it files with the Securities and Exchange Commission is called 8-K. The item numbers of the document filed by Tonix Pharmaceuticals on 2022-03-14 were 2.02 Earnings Release · 9.01 Financial Statements and Exhibits. The company cited a paper published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology in the press release attached to it. If the sentence citing the paper is translated verbatim, it reads as follows.
The oxytocin signaling complex reveals a molecular switch for cation dependence. Nat Struct Mol Biol (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41594-022-00728-4 2 Noyce, RS, et al.
What the reader should first check is where the company placed the paper in the press release. Next, it is necessary to determine whether the paper supports the entire company claim or only part of it. To answer the latter question, one must read the full paper. This article, which has read only 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 The oxytocin signaling complex reveals a molecular switch for cation dependence and it was published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology on 2022-03-01. The authors are affiliated with Stanford University · Stanford Medicine. The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article has read only up to this point. The paragraph was written by a person after filtering out a draft written by a machine by comparing numbers, so it is of a different grade than a full-text reading and judgment.
The abstract of this paper is not publicly available, so it has not been summarized. What can be understood from the title is that it is a structural biology study that deciphered the structure of a complex where oxytocin binds to a receptor and sends a signal, identifying a switch that turns the signal on and off depending on metal ions. It is not a human trial.
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 cited passage 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 terms of the calendar, 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 | +9.2% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the filing | −3.4% | On the filing day or the first trading day thereafter |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | +5.0% | One week |
| Cumulative +1~+20 trading days | −9.3% | 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 -9.3% in this case is within the bottom 47% 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% | −9.3% |
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 are 23 additional cases where the same company wrote papers in 8-K, and they are placed together in the table below.
| Disclosure date | the journal of the paper | a month's excess return |
|---|---|---|
| 2018-01-22 | PLoS ONE | −15.3% |
| 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% |
| 2022-04-06 | Public health reviews | −29.0% |
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, as the numbers specify whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract. The details of what occurred are read in the original text of each link.
- 2022-03-21 8-K Items 7.01, 8.01, 9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · Other events · Financial statements and exhibits
- 2022-03-22 8-K Item 7.01, 9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · financial statements · exhibits
- 2022-03-28 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 where. How many times the paper cited by the company has been cited afterward can be checked again 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 types are indicated by item numbers such as earnings, contracts, and executive changes. All the 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 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 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.