10,000 foot view on $CNCE and schizo. Cartoon lingo so all can follow.

One feature of schizo is too much dopamine. Dopamine blockers reduce psychosis and hallucinations. But schizos remain just as depressed and withdrawn and mentally slow as they were with out treatment.

All schizo drugs are about equally effective except clozapine which is better across all symptoms but:
a) unclear why
b) nastiest side effects

Clue why: clozapine is dirty, does lots of stuff, including NMDA agonism.

You're familiar w/ NMDA from its antagonists - they make you trip. Trips are a bit like schizo. That's a clue. Another clue is that schizo genetics are complex, lots of genes w/ small effect, many of which cluster around reduced signaling thru NMDA.

Another clue: meta-analysis of 26 RCTs w/ 800 patients of NMDA agonists looks pretty good across all symptoms. Some studies spectacular. Other studies not so good. I think I can explain most of the not so good ones. I'll give you an example.

Spectacular study delivered raw glycine 40-90 grams (!) per day. Drove like 3.5x increases in serum glycine and d-serine, both NMDA agonists. OK great, so companies developed enzyme inhibitors to boost glycine. Fail. But why? Glycine only rose about 50%. PK fail, not theory fail.

I think it's reasonable to assign a 25-50% probability that $CNCE is about to prove that NMDA hypofunction is closest thing to a root cause in a disease that's almost too complex to have root causes. 25-50% chance they show BY FAR the largest impact negative/cognitive symptoms.

The $CNCE drug is d-serine - the most potent NMDA co-agonist - where a hydrogen is swapped for deuterium, w/ intent of improving PK to damp kidney tox, but where actually changed metabolic profile and, plausibly, eliminated kidney tox.

As @drug_smolecules has pointed out, the comp is $KRTX, who rose above 5x from the ~same valuation $CNCE is at on their ph2 study. CNCE ph2 is of similar quality. It'll de-risk or kill the drug. We'll learn if it works and if it is safe. Data 1Q21.