Pharmaceutical filing citing American Journal of Transplantation paper — Tonix Pharmaceuticals, 2023-05-08
Tonix PharmaceuticalsTonix PharmaceuticalsNASDAQ TNXP
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in the American Journal of Transplantation 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 read the manner in which it wrote the paper and the actual scope the paper demonstrated, in sequence. It recorded where the stock price movement over the following month 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 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 2023-05-08 was 2.02 Earnings announcement · 9.01 Financial statements · Attached documents. The company cited a paper published in American Journal of Transplantation in the attached press release. Translating the sentence that cites the paper verbatim, it reads as follows.
In April 2023, the Company announced the online publication of two papers in the American Journal of Transplantation by faculty at the Center for Transplantation Sciences, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in collaboration with Tonix Pharmaceuticals 1,2 .
What readers should look at first is where the company placed the paper in the press release. Next, it is necessary 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 reads only the abstract, cannot answer that.
The scope of the paper mentioned in the abstract is up to here.
The title of the paper is TNX-1500, a crystallizable fragment–modified anti-CD154 antibody, prolongs nonhuman primate cardiac allograft survival and it was published in American Journal of Transplantation on 2023-04-06. The authors' affiliations are Sapporo Medical University · Massachusetts General Hospital · Sapporo Medical University Hospital · Teine Keijinkai Hospital. The summary 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 out a draft written by a machine reading the abstract, so it is a different grade from a full-text reading and a definitive judgment.
This is an experiment in which a monkey received a heart transplant from another monkey and was administered the antibody TNX-1500 for six months to prevent immune reactions. The group given the standard dose alone saw the transplanted heart survive for more than 265 days, the low-dose group for 99 days, and the low-dose group with added immunosuppressants for 88 days. The standard dose prevented the production of antibodies targeting the donor and also suppressed chronic rejection. No thrombotic complications were observed. Since this is an animal study, whether the same results would occur in humans is beyond the scope of this paper.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full text and appendices. This article stops short of those sections and leaves the gaps as they are. Readers are to judge for themselves which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the cited excerpt from the company, by comparing the two citations above.
One month later, the stock price was in the bottom quarter of the sample.
The portion of return not explained by market movement is called excess return. Dates are counted in trading days, meaning the days the stock market is open. On a calendar, 20 trading days are roughly a month. The excess return on the day of the regulatory filing and for the following month are listed in the table below.
| Period | Excess return relative to the market | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 5 trading days before the filing | −0.9% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the filing day | −1.7% | On the filing day or the first trading day thereafter |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | −45.1% | One week |
| Accumulated over +1 to +20 trading days | −45.9% | 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 -45.9% in this case is within the bottom quarter, at the 6% 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 | −31.8% | −20.1% | −6.9% | +5.5% | +19.5% | −45.9% |
Half of the sample falls between the two central marks on the chart. One checks from the chart whether this case lies within or outside the range. The sample collects cases where U.S.-listed companies cited papers in 8-K filings over the past ten years. 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 8-K, which are included in the table below.
| Filing date | Journal of the cited paper | Excess return over 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% |
Documents issued by the company after the filing
Only item numbers are listed for the three 8-K filings issued by the company after the filing date. In 8-K filings without titles, item numbers indicate the type of content. Whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract can be identified by the item number. The specific event is read in the original text of each link.
- 2023-05-09 8-K Items 3.03, 5.03, 8.01, 9.01 — Changes in rights of security holders · Bylaws amendments · Other events · Financial statements and exhibits
- 2023-05-17 8-K Items 7.01, 8.01, 9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · Other events · Financial statements · Attached documents
- 2023-05-22 8-K Items 7.01, 8.01, 9.01 — Reg FD disclosure · Other events · Financial statements · Attached documents
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only abstracts, does not answer how the paper re-examined what, by what method, and to what extent. How often the paper cited by the company was cited afterwards can be rechecked by OpenAlexOpenAlex
Data source · Website citation count. 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 performance, contracts, and executive changes. All events in this article come from this document.
- Excess return
- The remainder obtained by subtracting the market's overall return from the stock's return. It is used to observe the movement unique to the company by removing the portion attributable to the market's collective rise or fall.
- Trading day
- A date counting only the days 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 within it 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.