Prenuvo offers $2,500 full-body MRI scans that may detect cancer early

While celebrating the July Fourth holiday last yr on a ship in Tyler, Texas, Dr. Julianne Santarosa received the outcomes from her full-body MRI scan. What she saw put a damper on the festivities.

Radiologists at Prenuvo, which performed the scan, had identified a nodule in her lungs. Santarosa, who works as a spinal access surgeon in Dallas, could see the spot circled as she checked out the photographs from the patient portal on her phone.

“I used to be like, unless I swallowed a taco chip, that something shouldn’t be there,” she told CNBC in an interview. 

Before paying $2,500 for the Prenuvo scan, Santarosa, who was 41 on the time, hadn’t felt any pain in and round her lungs and had no reason to suspect anything specific was unsuitable. Slightly, she’d felt generally off since going through in vitro fertilization and had a gut feeling she should do the scan after seeing a Prenuvo ad on Facebook.

The day after seeing her Prenuvo results, Santarosa had a follow-up CT scan at a neighborhood hospital. The nodule was cancerous. She had it removed the next week.

Curious and anxious patients like Santarosa are flooding Prenuvo’s nine clinics within the U.S. and Canada. There’s a lot demand that the 5-year-old Silicon Valley-based company has announced 11 more locations opening by 2024, including one in London and one other in Sydney.

Kim Kardashian called Prenuvo a “life saving machine” in an August post on Instagram that is generated greater than 3.4 million likes. Actress and model Cindy Crawford is an investor, alongside Google ex-Chairman Eric Schmidt, 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki and Nest Labs founder Tony Fadell. The corporate raised $70 million late last yr in a funding round led by Felicis Ventures.

Prenuvo CEO Andrew Lacy said he desires to help customers understand what is going on on beneath their skin, which his company’s technology can do by identifying greater than 500 conditions like cancer, multiple sclerosis and brain aneurysms. As of now, the scans have a limited audience because they are not covered by insurers, requiring patients to pay out of pocket.

For Santarosa, the imaging was price every penny and more. Her cancer was detected early enough that she didn’t have to undergo treatments like chemotherapy or radiation. More importantly, it hadn’t spread to the purpose that it was life threatening.

“There is not any screening test for this,” Santarosa said. “I’d’ve been stage 4. I’d’ve figured this out once I was coughing up blood.”

An MRI, which stands for magnetic resonance imaging, is traditionally used when ordered by a health care provider. Interpreting the photographs is a posh science, and the scan alone can take greater than an hour, even when it covers just a part of the body.

Prenuvo’s custom MRI machines, which received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2018, can scan an individual’s entire body in about an hour. Once a scan is complete, the photographs are reviewed by one in every of the corporate’s 30 licensed radiologists. Customers normally receive their results back inside five to 10 business days.  

Waitlists are long. In line with Prenuvo’s website, the subsequent available slot for a full-body scan in Recent York is in March. The identical is true for the Los Angeles clinic. Within the Dallas suburb of Irving, there’s availability starting in mid-December.

Lacy said the business has spiked as awareness prior to now 12 months has grown “incredibly.”

“As of late, when people ask me what I do, and I say I work at Prenuvo, it’s ‘Oh, I heard that on this podcast,’ or ‘That influencer talked about it,'” he said.

Along with full-body scans, Prenuvo offers a head and torso scan for $1,800 and a scan of just the torso for $1,000.

Many radiologists are fighting burnout as an aging population has led to mounting caseloads. Emerging technologies like AI have also discouraged some young physicians from pursuing the practice. By 2034, the U.S. could see an estimated shortage of as much as 35,600 radiologists and other specialists, based on a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges. 

Up to now, it’s an issue Prenuvo has managed to avoid. 

Lacy said Prenuvo has a backlog of radiologists who wish to work for the corporate. In traditional medicine, radiologists are sometimes diagnosing patients with serious and advanced diseases, so identifying conditions early generally is a welcome change, he said.

“While you’re catching stage 1 cancer, what you are doing will save lives,” Lacy said.

Prenuvo remains to be in its early days. Medical examiners caution that, along with the steep price, full-body MRI scans won’t catch all the things and are not meant to exchange targeted screenings like colonoscopies and mammograms.

“It’s a tool that your physician and you should utilize, however it doesn’t replace a full diagnostic examination,” said Dr. Jasnit Makkar, an assistant professor of radiology at Columbia University Medical Center, in an interview. “It’s a work in progress.”

Dr. Kimberly Amrami, vice chair of the department of radiology at Mayo Clinic Rochester, said that due to the constraints, patients’ expectations must be set accordingly. She said it may well be difficult to discover lesions within the lungs, as an illustration, and scanning different body parts just like the knee, the pelvis, the breasts and the prostate all require different techniques. 

“There’s at all times a want to do an exam that is going to reply every query,” Amrami said in an interview. “It’s just not likely the way in which that it really works with MRI particularly, because the way in which that you just evaluate different body parts in several disease states is sort of different.”

Prenuvo doesn’t use contrast, a heavy metal that is injected into the blood vessels, when conducting its scans. Contrast will help radiologists visualize certain conditions higher, but there’s controversy surrounding its use, and the corporate doesn’t wish to deter people.

Lacy said Prenuvo’s hardware was designed to do “almost pretty much as good a job” as contrast by utilizing other techniques. 

“We imagine that that is the most effective possible solution for screening patients who’re at normal risk and asymptomatic,” he said. “If we discover something that is very concerning, oftentimes, we are going to suggest that the patient gets some sort of follow-up dedicated imaging that may involve contrast.”

Amrami said people should seek the advice of with their physicians to find out what form of imaging works best for them. 

“There isn’t a one-size-fits-all for MRI,” Amrami said.

A glance inside a Prenuvo clinic

Lacy said he was inspired to create Prenuvo after he began to wonder about how his high-stress lifestyle was affecting his body. He previously began a web search company and helped found a gaming company, amongst other ventures.

He found a radiologist who was offering an early version of a full-body MRI scan. Lacy said he learned so much from that have. 

“Although my lifestyle was impacting my health, there was nothing crazy occurring,” Lacy said. “I remember just this incredible feeling of peace of mind.” 

Prenuvo designed its experience for leisure. Its Recent York location has the texture of a cross between a spa and a health care provider’s office.

Upon arrival on the clinic, patients are led from a comfy waiting room to a personal area where they will change into scrubs and take away their jewelry.

While lying down within the machine, patients are given a pair of headphones and may decide to take heed to music or watch TV through the scan.

Dr. Eduardo Dolhun, a family physician in San Francisco, decided to get his first Prenuvo scan greater than five years ago after Lacy stopped by his office. He said he was skeptical but intrigued by the technology, so he decided to fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, to try an early version of it. 

After going through his results with a Prenuvo radiologist, Dolhun called one in every of his medical school peers on the Mayo Clinic. 

“I believe that is going to alter medicine,'” Dolhun said, recalling the conversation.

Dolhun said he gets a scan every 18 months or so and recommends it to a few of his patients. He still advises them to get screening exams like physicals and mammograms as well.

“Good science takes time,” he said. 

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