In short
More than 200 people with Parkinson's had been dosed in the research studies. Dr. Jack Jacobs was honored by Nevada's bioscience association.
The April 2025 update led with an award. On April 2, 2025, the Nevada biotechnology association named Dr. Jack Jacobs, Zhittya's president, its Man of the Year for a 40-year career in developing biological medicines. More than 300 people attended the dinner, including some participants from the Parkinson's research studies. The update said more than 200 people with Parkinson's had been dosed with FGF-1 by that point.
A large part of the update covered other topics. The sections on the research are summarized below.
Dr. Jacobs had completed a paper on FGF-1 and recovery after stroke. The update said Zhittya had dosed five people who had had a stroke and that the team had seen improvements in them. It acknowledged that this was a small sample.
Nerve pain study
Viktoriya Montano, the company's vice president of strategic innovations, reported on a first participant with peripheral neuropathy, which is nerve damage that causes pain and numbness, often in the feet. The idea was to restore blood flow to the affected area. FGF-1 was injected at 26 points in one foot, and the other foot was left alone for comparison.
She wrote that the dosed foot swelled and reddened the next day and that the swelling settled within five to seven days. The participant reported less pain in that foot over the following two months. She expected a fuller picture at three months.
Dr. Jacobs on leaky blood vessels
Dr. Jacobs wrote about a growing body of evidence that blood flow problems may be an early event in several brain disorders, including Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis. He and other researchers believe the fault lies in the blood vessels themselves, which become dysfunctional and leaky. The term for this is endothelial cell dysfunction.
Endothelial cells are the flat cells that line every blood vessel in a single layer. They let small molecules such as oxygen, water and glucose pass through to feed the surrounding tissue, and they hold back larger things such as blood cells and proteins. When this lining is damaged, he explained, blood flow drops and substances that should stay in the blood can escape. One of them, a clotting protein called fibrinogen, can coat a nearby nerve cell so that the immune system attacks it.
He described a study in mice with a condition modeled on multiple sclerosis. A damaged vessel lining in the spinal cord looked well ordered again after 30 days of FGF-1. He wrote that findings like this were a reason to study whether FGF-1, given through the nose, could have a beneficial effect in other diseases in which brain nerve cells are progressively lost.
Other items
The update repeated its description of the outreach program, in which supporters and some doctors give talks about the research to local groups. It shared comments from two participants, on topics that included mobility, typing, tremor and sleep. It also noted that the brain imaging studies at Washington University in St. Louis, which measure brain blood flow before and after dosing, were continuing.
This summary covers the Parkinson's research in the April 2025 update. The complete update, including the other topics it covered, is below.
Read the complete April 2025 update as published
The text of the update Zhittya sent, word for word. Pictures, charts and layout are in the PDF. Open the PDF.