Pharmaceutical regulatory filing citing MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report paper — Tonix Pharmaceuticals, 2022-05-09
Tonix PharmaceuticalsTonix PharmaceuticalsNASDAQ TNXP
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in its regulatory filing with 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 of the paper in sequence. 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 files a current report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, called 8-K. The item numbers of the document filed by Tonix Pharmaceuticals on 2022-05-09 were 2.02 Earnings announcement · 7.01 Reg FD disclosure · 9.01 Financial statements · Attached documents. The company cited a paper published in MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in the attached press release. The sentence citing the paper, copied verbatim from the original, is as follows.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7117e3 Recent Highlights--Financial As of March 31, 2022, Tonix had $140.4 million of cash and cash equivalents, compared to $178.7 million as of December 31, 2021. Subsequent to March 31, 2022, the Company sold 33.9 million shares of common stock in at-the-market offerings (ATM) sales under a Sales Agreement with A.G.P./Alliance Global Partners, for net proceeds of approximately $6.8 million.
What readers should look at first is where the company placed the paper in the press release. Next, they should determine whether the paper supports the company's entire 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 provide an answer.
The scope of the paper discussed in the abstract is limited to this.
The paper title is Seroprevalence of Infection-Induced SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies — United States, September 2021–February 2022 and it was published in MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on 2022-04-26. The authors' affiliations are unconfirmed. The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article only read up to that point. 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 original judgment.
This document is not a paper but a weekly report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From September 2021, when the Omicron variant spread, to February 2022, it tracked the proportion of people with antibodies after infection by age group using blood samples from commercial testing laboratories. Since asymptomatic or undiagnosed infections are not captured in reporting statistics, this is an investigation to estimate the actual scale of infection using antibody prevalence. The numerical ratios are in the main text table and not in the abstract.
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.
A month later, the stock price was within the bottom quarter of the sample.
The return remaining after subtracting the portion that moves with the entire 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 about a month. The regulatory filing day in this case and the excess return for the following month are listed in the table below.
| Period | Excess return relative to the market | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 5 trading days before the filing | +0.8% | The extent to which it had already moved before the filing |
| regulatory filing day | −3.5% | filing day or the first trading day thereafter |
| +1~+5 trading day cumulative | −33.1% | one week |
| +1~+20 trading day cumulative | −47.6% | 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 -47.6% in this case is in the bottom quarter, corresponding to the 5% from the bottom among 142 samples.
| sample scale (20 trading days) | Tenth from the bottom | Fourth from the bottom | median | top 25% | top 10% | this case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| excess return | −31.8% | −20.1% | −6.9% | +5.5% | +19.5% | −47.6% |
Half of the sample falls between the two middle marks in the table. Check the table to see 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 instances 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 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% |
| 2022-03-14 | Nature Structural & Molecular Biology | −9.3% |
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. Whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract can be identified by the number. The specific event is read in the original text of each link.
- 2022-05-16 8-K Items 3.03,5.03,8.01,9.01 — Change in rights of security holders · Change in bylaws · Other events · Financial statements and exhibits
- 2022-05-18 8-K Items 7.01,8.01,9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · Other events · Financial statements and exhibits
- 2022-05-31 8-K Item 7.01, 8.01, 9.01 — Reg FD Disclosure · Other Events · Financial Statements and Exhibits
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only abstracts, cannot answer how the paper re-examined what, by what method, and to what extent. How often the paper cited by the company was cited afterward can be re-confirmed through the citation count on 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 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission when a 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 observe 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. weekends and holidays are excluded, so 20 trading days is about a 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 was found. without reading the full text, details and limitations of the method cannot be known.