Patients line up for $2,500 full-body MRI scans that can help detect cancer early

While celebrating the 4th of July holiday last year on a boat in Tyler, Texas, Dr. Julianne Santarosa the results of her full-body MRI scan. What she saw put a damper on the festivities.

Radiologists from Prenuvo, who performed the scan, had discovered a lump in her lungs. Santarosa, who works as a spinal access surgeon in Dallas, noticed the circled spot while looking at the patient portal images on her phone.

“I was like, unless I swallowed a taco chip, there shouldn’t be anything there,” she told CNBC in an interview.

Before Santarosa, who was 41 at the time, paid $2,500 for the Prenuvo scan, she had felt no pain in and around her lungs and had no reason to suspect anything specific was going on. Instead, she had been feeling generally bad since the in vitro fertilization and felt like she had to do the scan after seeing a Prenuvo advertisement on Facebook.

The day after seeing her Prenuvo results, Santarosa underwent a follow-up CT scan at a local hospital. The lump was cancerous. She had it removed the following week.

Curious and concerned patients like Santarosa are flooding Prenuvo’s nine clinics in the US and Canada. There’s so much demand that the five-year-old Silicon Valley company has announced it will open 11 more locations in 2024, including one in London and one in Sydney.

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

Prenuvo CEO Andrew Lacy said he wants to help customers understand what’s happening under their skin, which his company’s technology can do by identifying more than 500 conditions such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and brain aneurysms. As of now, the scans have a limited audience because they are not covered by insurers, forcing patients to pay out of pocket.

For Santarosa, the imaging was worth every penny and more. Her cancer was discovered so early that she did not have to undergo treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation. More importantly, the disease had not yet spread to the point where it became life-threatening.

“There is no screening test for it,” Santarosa said. “I would have been stage 4. I would have discovered this when I coughed up blood.”

An MRI, which stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is traditionally used as prescribed by a doctor. Interpreting the images is a complex science and the scan alone can take more than an hour, even if it only covers part of the body.

Prenuvo’s custom MRI machines, which received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2018, can scan a person’s entire body in about an hour. Once a scan is completed, the images are reviewed by one of the company’s 30 certified radiologists. Customers typically receive their results back within five to ten business days.

Waiting lists are long. According to Prenuvo’s website, the next available time for a full body scan in New York is in March. The same goes for the clinic in Los Angeles. In the Dallas suburb of Irving, availability starts in mid-December.

Lacy said business has peaked as awareness has grown “incredibly” over the past 12 months.

“Nowadays 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.

In addition to full-body scans, Prenuvo offers a head and torso scan for $1,800, and a torso-only scan for $1,000.

Lacy said Prenuvo is working to lower prices through “old-fashioned scaling.”

Some companies have started offering Prenuvo scans as a perk for employees, increasing access to the technology. Lacy said it works for companies with self-funded insurance plans because they can customize their offerings while still bearing the risks.

Traditional insurance companies are paying attention.

“Over time, that data helps inform insurance companies as to whether this should be something that would be covered under the insurance plans they offer,” Lacy said.

Prenuvo is looking at other ways to reduce costs through artificial intelligence and potentially reducing the duration of scans even further. Lacy said the costs are directly related to the amount of time customers spend in the expensive machines.

Radiologists form the core of Prenuvo’s activities. That brings its own challenges.

Many radiologists are suffering from burnout, because the aging of the population has led to an increasing workload. Emerging technologies such as AI have also discouraged some young doctors from pursuing this practice. The U.S. could see an estimated shortage of as many as 35,600 radiologists and other specialists by 2034, according to a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

So far, it’s a problem Prenuvo has managed to avoid.

Lacy said Prenuvo has a backlog of radiologists wanting to work for the company. In traditional medicine, radiologists often diagnose patients with serious and advanced diseases, so identifying conditions early can be a welcome change, he said.

“If you get stage 1 cancer, what you do will save lives,” Lacy said.

Prenuvo is still in its infancy. Medical experts warn that, in addition to the high price, full-body MRI scans won’t catch everything and are not intended to replace targeted screenings such as colonoscopies and mammograms.

“It’s a tool that your doctor and you can use, but it doesn’t replace a full diagnostic exam,” Dr. Jasnit Makkar, assistant professor of radiology at Columbia University Medical Center, said in an interview. “It’s a work in progress.”

Dr. Kimberly Amrami, vice chair of the radiology department at Mayo Clinic Rochester, said because of the restrictions, patients’ expectations should be set accordingly. She said it can be challenging to identify lesions in the lungs, for example, and that scanning different body parts such as the knee, pelvis, breasts and prostate all require different techniques.

“There is always the desire to take an exam that answers every question,” Amrami said in an interview. “It’s just not really the way it works with MRI in particular, because the way you evaluate different body parts in different disease states is very different.”

Prenuvo does not use contrast, a heavy metal that is injected into the blood vessels, when performing its scans. Contrast can help radiologists better visualize certain conditions, but there is controversy surrounding its use and the company doesn’t want to scare people away.

Lacy said Prenuvo’s hardware is designed to do “almost as good a job” when contrasted with the use of other techniques.

“We believe this is the best possible solution for screening patients who are at normal risk and are asymptomatic,” he said. “If we find something that is very concerning, we will often suggest that the patient have some type of follow-up specific imaging that may involve contrast.”

Amrami said people should consult their doctor to determine which type of imaging works best for them.

“There is no one-size-fits-all for MRI,” Amrami said.

A look inside a Prenuvo clinic

Lacy said he was inspired to create Prenuvo after he started wondering how his stressful lifestyle was affecting his body. He previously started an Internet search company and helped found a gaming company, among other things.

He found a radiologist who offered an early version of a full-body MRI scan. Lacy said he learned a lot from that experience.

“Although my lifestyle was affecting my health, there was nothing crazy going on,” Lacy said. “I remember this incredible feeling of peace.”

Prenuvo designed his experience for relaxation. The New York location is reminiscent of a cross between a spa and a doctor’s office.

Upon arrival at the clinic, patients are led from a cozy waiting room to a private area where they can change clothes and remove their jewelry.

While in the machine, patients are given headphones and can listen to music or watch TV during the scan.

Dr. Eduardo Dolhun, a primary care physician in San Francisco, decided to have his first Prenuvo scan more 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 reviewing his results with a radiologist from Prenuvo, Dolhun called one of his medical school colleagues at the Mayo Clinic.

“I think this is going to change medicine,” Dolhun said, recalling the conversation.

Dolhun said he gets a scan about every 18 months and recommends it to some of his patients. He still advises them to also undergo screening exams, such as physical exams and mammograms.

“Good science takes time,” he said.

WATCH: Amazon links One Medical to Prime offering