I think I see one big problem that can make the whole study not so strong. You say you do these studies only on adults. But autism, it is a neurodevelopmental condition, right? This means the brain differences start very early, when the brain is still building itself.
If you only test the brain chemistry in adults, you are like looking at a tree that is already fully grown. You can see it is a different shape, but you don’t know if the reason is from the seed, or from the soil when it was a young tree, or from many years of wind. The brain of an adult with autism has lived a whole life, it has learned to adapt, maybe to compensate. So the ‘shift’ you see with medicine in an adult brain, is it showing the real, original neurodivergent pathway? Or is it showing a brain that has already changed itself to live in a world made for neurotypical people?
This is important for your goal to find good targets for medicine. If the neurochemical systems work one way in a child’s developing brain and another way in an adult’s adapted brain, then a medicine that ‘shifts’ something in an adult might not work the same, or could even be not good, for a child.
So, how you can be sure that what you learn from adult brains will really help for the younger people, where the support is maybe most needed? Maybe this gap between the developing brain and the adult brain is another big translational gap that your method, by using only adults, is not yet bridging? This maybe compromize the whole idea that you can find good pharmacological targets for autism from these studies.