Pharmaceutical filing citing Journal of Pain paper — Vistagen Therapeutics, 2017-04-28
Vistagen TherapeuticsVistagen TherapeuticsNASDAQ VTGN
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in the Journal of Pain as a basis for its claims in a 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 the paper demonstrated, in sequence. The stock price movement over one month following the filing was 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 like this in the press release
When a U.S. listed company has an event to inform shareholders, the form it files with the Securities and Exchange Commission is called 8-K. The item numbers of the document filed by Vistagen Therapeutics on 2017-04-28 were 8.01 Other Events · 9.01 Financial Statements and Exhibits. The company cited a paper published in Journal of Pain in the press release attached to it. If the sentence citing the paper is translated verbatim, it reads as follows.
The publication, titled: “Characterization of the effects of L-4-chlorokynurenine on nociception in rodents,” by lead author, Tony L. Yaksh, Ph.D., Professor in Anesthesiology at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and co-authors, Robert Schwarcz, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, and H.
What readers should first check is where the company placed the paper in the press release. Next, they should determine whether the paper supports the entire company claim or only a 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 Characterization of the Effects of L-4-Chlorokynurenine on Nociception in Rodents and it was published in Journal of Pain on 2017-04-18. The authors are affiliated with University of California San Diego · University of Maryland, Baltimore · VistaGen Therapeutics (United States). 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 reading of the paper.
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 an animal experiment conducted on rodents to examine how the substance L-4-chloroquinoline affects pain responses. It is not a result from human patients.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full paper and the appendix. This article, which has not gone beyond the abstract, leaves the blanks as they are. Readers should compare the two citations above to determine which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the citation made 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 calendar terms, 20 trading days are about a 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 | −1.6% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the filing | +1.0% | On the filing day or the first trading day thereafter |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | +10.2% | One week |
| Cumulative +1~+20 trading days | −8.4% | 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 −8.4% in this case is within the bottom 48% 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% | −8.4% |
Half of the sample falls between the two marks in the middle of the table. From the table, one confirms whether this case is 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.
After the regulatory filing, the company issued such documents
After the filing date, the company issued three 8-K filings, listed only by item numbers. 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 that number. What exactly happened is read in the original text of each link.
- 2017-05-01 8-K Item 8.01, 9.01 — Other Events · Financial Statements · Exhibits
- 2017-06-29 8-K Items 2.02,8.01,9.01 — Earnings announcement · Other events · Financial statements and exhibits
- 2017-08-09 8-K Item 8.01, 9.01 — Other Events · Financial Statements · Exhibits
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only the abstract, cannot answer what the paper reviewed, how it was done, or what it showed. How often the paper cited by the company has been cited since can be checked again using 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.
Glossary
- 8-K
- A voluntary report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission when a U.S. listed company has something to inform shareholders. Types are 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 observe the movement of this company alone by removing the portion where the market as a whole rises or falls.
- Trading day
- A date counting only 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
- An abstract is 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 or limitations of the methods.