Prenuvo is a startup that wants to help people find out if they have cancer by using an magnetic resonance image.
The company, based in British Columbia, said on October 18 that it had raised $70 million to give consumers whole-body magnetic resonance scans. It claims to be able to detect hundreds of diseases by taking pictures of the inside of someone's body. Prenuvo's new funding will allow it to open more clinics in the US and expand into other countries.
Cancer can be treated early if you catch it early.
Some doctors and experts think that Prenuvo's approach may do more harm than good.
Dr. Bernard Katz, a family medicine physician at UCLA Health, told Insider that if the scans pick up something in the body that looks abnormal, it might be more dangerous to have it checked out. If there are cancer cells in an area that needs to be tested, it might be necessary to get a biopsies to confirm the results of an magnetic resonance image. If the biopsies is normal, then a person has put themselves under a lot of stress.
There is a market of people who want to learn more about diseases that may be in their body, such as genetic testing from 23andMe.
These products can help someone decide if they want to enter the medical system and if they need care. Increased access to healthcare is a good thing, but some companies will profit from the fact that people want to know every detail about their health, even if they don't have a way of interpreting abnormal results.
Andrew and Rajpaul Attariwal founded Prenuvo.
For the last four years, Attariwala has been doing whole-body scans using magnetic resonance technology. The two met when he got one of the scans.
The CEO of Prenuvo said that he learned more about his health than he had been told. He was relieved that the scans didn't find anything abnormal. He wanted to make that experience available to more people.
Prenuvo uses proprietary software and artificial-intelligence tools to make its scans different from other scans offered in hospitals.
The majority of magnetic resonance scans rely on the ability to show organs. Core to Prenuvo's protocols have a heavy reliance on the combination of anatomical and functional scans, which increases the ability of magnetic resonance to discriminate many conditions.
Prenuvo doesn't take insurance and charges up to $2,500 for a whole-body scans. According to the website, the scans are performed by technologists who are trained to read Prenuvo scans.
The patient can take the result of the scans to their primary-care doctor if they find something abnormal.
Prenuvo wouldn't say how many people it has scanned, but it did say that the company has helped make over 200,000 medical diagnoses.
People with no symptoms of disease are encouraged to get one of these scans, and the company recommends a Scan every two years.
The idea is to put the patient in the center of their own health so they can make their own health decisions and work with their primary-care physicians to get the care that they really need.
Prenuvo hasn't published any studies showing that these scans catch diseases early. Prenuvo is looking for people to take part in a trial.
For people curious about what might be in their bodies undetected, whole-body magnetic resonance scans have been available for more than 20 years.
It's not accessible to most people. The "full body plus" scans are designed to detect cancer in the head, neck, and torso.
The market for whole-body magnetic resonances isn't growing according to Safavi.
Whole-body magnetic resonances are used in hospitals for some people who have cancer but not all of them.
Sometimes these scans are used to see if an existing cancer has spread. They can be used to check for cancer in children.
The American College of Preventive Medicine doesn't recommend whole-body scans for people who don't show signs of disease.
After follow-up testing, the abnormality that was caught by the magnetic resonance instrument is nothing to be concerned about.
Matthew Davenport is the vice chair of the American College of Radiology's Quality and Safety Commission.
He said it was a bad idea.
There's a big risk with using a scanning device that's as sensitive as an magnetic resonance image to find anomalies that are later found to be benign. People with a higher risk for disease might be a good candidate for screening.
Davenport said that every organ with a sensitive test will hurt the patients. He said that more procedures down the line might pose a bigger risk than the scans themselves.
He said that there were things that would never happen to the patient. For findings in the body that would never have any importance for the patient, you end up triggering workups.
It was suggested that Prenuvo's technique could reduce the chance of finding something that isn't a concern. Cancerous tumors can have a higher tissue density if Prenuvo uses a type of magnetic resonance image called a diffusion-weighted image. Lung tumors can have higher density if they are more cancer-causing.
People who have gotten Prenuvo'sMRIs have reached out to the company to express their gratitude. He said that if you read reviews about the company, you will see people talking about how they saved lives.
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