Regulatory filing citing a Nucleic Acids Research paper — Wave Life Sciences, 2023-05-23
Wave Life SciencesWave Life SciencesNASDAQ WVE
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published in Nucleic Acids Research as a basis for its claims in a regulatory filing submitted to 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 demonstrated by 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 was written in the press release as follows:
When a U.S. listed company has an event to inform shareholders, it files a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wave Life Sciences filed this document on 2023-05-23, with item numbers 7.01 Reg FD disclosure · 8.01 Other events · 9.01 Financial statements and exhibits. The company cited a paper published in Nucleic Acids Research in the press release attached to it. The sentence citing the paper, translated verbatim, is as follows.
Liu et al., 2023 Nuc Acids Res doi: 10.1093/nar/gkad268; Right: ICV: Intracerebroventricular; APP: Amyloid precursor protein ; CNS: 30 central nervous system; B6 mice were administered PBS or 100 μg of APP siRNA by ICV injection on day 0 (n=7).
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 company's entire 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.
The paper's title is Impact of stereopure chimeric backbone chemistries on the potency and durability of gene silencing by RNA interference and it was published in Nucleic Acids Research on 2023-04-18. The authors are affiliated with Wave Life Sciences (United States). The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article has read only up to this point. This paragraph was written by a person after filtering out a draft generated by a machine reading the abstract, and thus it is of a different quality than a full reading of the paper.
This study is an experimental study conducted on mouse hepatocytes, not on humans. The research team introduced stereochemically pure PS and PN linkages into GalNAc-siRNA and investigated the mRNA silencing effect. Experimental results with multiple targets showed higher silencing effects and duration than existing standard materials. However, this study does not directly demonstrate therapeutic effects in humans.
What the abstract does not answer remains in the full paper and its appendices. This article, which has not gone beyond the abstract, leaves those gaps as they are. Readers should compare the two citations above to determine which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the part cited 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 | −9.9% | The extent of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the filing | +2.6% | On the filing day or the first trading day after |
| Accumulated over +1 to +5 trading days | +8.4% | One week |
| Cumulative +1~+20 trading days | +4.1% | 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 +4.1% in this case is within the bottom 72% of the 142 cases in the sample, and it is within 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% | −7.4% | +5.5% | +19.5% | +4.1% |
Half of the sample falls between the two marks in the middle of the table. One checks from the table 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 disclosure, the company issued such documents
After the disclosure date, the company issued three 8-K filings. Only the item numbers are listed. In 8-K filings without titles, the item number indicates the type of content. One can tell 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.
- 2023-08-03 8-K Items 2.02,7.01,9.01 — Earnings announcement · Reg FD disclosure · Financial statements·Exhibits
- 2023-08-07 8-K Items 5.02,5.07,9.01 — Officer·Director changes · Shareholder meeting results · Financial statements·Exhibits
- 2023-09-05 8-K Item 7.01, 9.01 — Reg FD Disclosure · Financial Statements · Exhibits
What this article does not answer
This article, which reads only the abstract, does not answer what method the paper used, what it reviewed, and how far it went. 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.
Glossary
- 8-K
- A voluntary report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission when a U.S. listed company has news to inform shareholders. Types are indicated by item numbers such as earnings, contracts, and executive changes. All events in this article are derived 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 the company alone by removing the portion of the market's collective rise and fall.
- 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.