Acknowledging Our Valued
Partners and Collaborators

The InLighta team, under the direction of founder and current Chief Scientific Officer Jenny J Yang, Ph.D.,  is pioneering the development of innovative contrast agents. Dr. Yang’s research team has created a novel platform for developing protein MRI gadolinium-binding contrast agents (ProCAs) by designing and embedding several metal binding sites into a scaffold protein, leading to the development of significantly improved MRI contrast agents for clinical applications. Two categories of protein contrast agents have been developed. One, exemplified by ProCA32, is derived from human parvalbumin with mutations incorporated into the metal binding sites to improve affinity and selectivity for gadolinium. The second category, as exemplified by ProCA32.CXCR4 (liver cancer detection) and ProCA32.HER2 (breast cancer detection) builds on ProCa32 by adding a ligand binding moiety that selectively binds a target receptor overexpressed on the tissue of interest.