This really sounds like marketing and more of the same to me. Clinical trials with placebos regularly overestimate the effects of APs. Especially the early ones. They’re not really double blinds, because if the AP has any effect, that includes side effects, and patients quickly become aware that they have been given an AP or a placebo. And that leads to increased placebo effects in the AP group and decreased placebo effects in the placebo group. This also means that a slight improvement in negative symptoms might actually be a slight worsening of negative symptoms in later studies. Just like the meds we have now.
I’m not very hopeful about any of this. We’d need to see some pretty drastic changes to assume we have found a treatment that acts on the causes of schizophrenia and isn’t just another “positive symptom suppressor” like the ones that we already have. And “novel causal mechanism” doesn’t really mean much when we don’t really understand how the meds we currently have work either.