Meet Prenuvo, a company that says its whole-body MRI scan can detect the earliest stages of disease. Experts say it could do more harm than good.

• Prenuvo, a company offering preventive MRI scans, raised a $70 million Series A in October.
• It claims its scans can save lives by detecting ailments early — but not all experts are convinced.

Prenuvo is a startup that wants to help people see whether they have diseases like cancer by scanning their bodies with an MRI.

On October 18, the company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, said it had raised a $70 million Series A to provide whole-body MRI scans to consumers. It claims to be able to detect more than 500 diseases or abnormalities, including early-stage cancers, by getting pictures of the interior of someone's body. With its new funding, Prenuvo is planning to further expand into the US and open several more clinics, alongside its five existing clinics in the US.

The idea of catching cancer or other disorders early on is alluring: If you catch it early, you can treat it early.

But not all doctors and experts recommend Prenuvo's approach — they argue that it may do more harm than good in otherwise healthy people.

Dr. Bernard Katz, a family-medicine physician at UCLA Health, told Insider that while getting an MRI scan itself may not be that risky, if it picks up something in the body that looks abnormal, getting that checked out might be more dangerous. For instance, getting a biopsy — an invasive procedure to test whether there are cancerous cells in an area of concern — might be necessary to confirm an MRI result. And if the biopsy is normal, then a person has put themselves under that physical and mental stress for nothing.

Dr. Kaveh Safavi, a senior managing director at Accenture, said there's a market of people who want to learn more about any diseases that might be lurking in their body — for example, genetic testing from 23andMe claims to tell people if they have a predisposition for a condition that they should address.

Like Prenuvo's MRIs, these products can help someone decide whether they want to enter the medical system and help people access care they may need. Ultimately, however, while increased access to healthcare is a good thing, some companies stand to profit off the fact that people want to know every detail about their health, even if they have no way of interpreting whether abnormal results are cause for serious concern.

Prenuvo uses a combination of hardware and software to see inside the body

Prenuvo was founded in 2018 by Andrew Lacy and Dr. Rajpaul Attariwala, an MRI physicist and radiologist.

Attariwala had been doing whole-body scans since 2010, using MRI technology to scan for anything that looked abnormal. Lacy met him while getting one of these scans.

"I learned more about my health than the medical system had told me my entire life," said Lacy, now the CEO of Prenuvo. The scan didn't pick up anything abnormal, which was a relief to him. He said he wanted to bring that experience to more people.

Lacy said Prenuvo uses proprietary software and artificial-intelligence tools invented by Attariwala to make its whole-body scans different from other scans offered in hospitals.

"Most MRI scans rely on anatomical imaging, which simply shows organ structures," Lacy said. "Core to Prenuvo's imaging protocols is a heavy reliance on the combination of anatomical imaging together with newer functional imaging techniques, which increases the ability of MRI to accurately discriminate many conditions."

Prenuvo's website indicates it charges $1,000 for a torso scan, $1,800 for a head-and-torso scan, and $2,500 for a whole-body scan, and it doesn't take insurance. The website says the scans are performed by MRI technologists and analyzed by radiologists trained to read Prenuvo scans.

Lacy said that if a scan finds something abnormal, it shows up in a patient's dashboard — that patient can take the result to their primary-care physician.

Prenuvo declined to disclose how many people it has scanned, though Lacy said the company has helped make close to 250,000 medical diagnoses.

Lacy said that people with and without symptoms of disease are encouraged to get one of these scans and that the company recommends a scan every two years.

"The idea here is to be able to put the patient in the center of their own health so they can make their own health decisions and they can go out into the health system and work with their primary-care physicians to then get the care that they really need," Lacy said.

Prenuvo has not published any studies finding that these scans catch diseases early and improve people's health. Lacy said Prenuvo is recruiting for a clinical trial.

Whole-body MRI scans aren't accessible for everyone

Safavi said whole-body MRI scans have been available for more than two decades for people curious about what might be in their bodies undetected.

But at nearly $2,500 per scan, it's not accessible to everyone. Ezra, a similar company, charges a similar price for a "full body plus" scan it says is designed to detect cancers in the head, neck, pelvis, chest, and abdomen.

Safavi said that as far as he's seen, the market for whole-body MRIs isn't growing.

Today, whole-body MRIs are used in clinical settings like hospitals for some people who have cancer or a predisposition for cancer — but not all of them.

For example, sometimes these scans are used to see whether an existing cancer has spread to other parts of the body. They can also be used to monitor for tumor recurrence or monitor for cancer in some children.

However, the American College of Preventive Medicine does not recommend whole-body scans for asymptomatic people, citing a lack of data about its effectiveness.

Some experts say the scans may do more harm than good

MRIs are an extremely powerful tool, but they can catch abnormalities that may look concerning but after follow-up testing turn out to be nothing of concern.

Dr. Matthew Davenport, the vice chair of the American College of Radiology's Quality and Safety Commission, said that using MRIs to screen the general population is not likely to improve patient health.

"It is a terrible idea," he said.

Davenport said there's a big risk with using a scan as sensitive as an MRI of finding abnormalities that are later found to be benign. Screening may make sense for people with a higher risk for disease.

But Davenport said that for the general public, imaging every organ with such a sensitive test "will harm the patients." Even if the scan itself doesn't pose much of a risk, he said, more procedures down the line might pose a bigger risk.

"You find all sorts of stuff that would never occur to the patient," he said. "And you end up triggering workups, biopsies for imaging studies, operations, for findings in the body that would never have any importance for the patient."

Attariwala suggested that Prenuvo's MRI technique could reduce the risk of finding abnormalities in the scan that end up not being concerns. Prenuvo uses a type of MRI called diffusion-weighted imaging that measures tissue hardness, and cancerous tumors can have a higher tissue density. For some lung tumors, higher density can suggest a growth is more cancerous.

Lacy added that people who've gotten Prenuvo's MRIs had reached out to the company to express their thanks. "And if you read reviews about the company," he said, "you'll see people talking about that we found cancers and literally saved lives."