If you had stage one cancer, you’d want to know. That’s the premise upon which private, full-body MRI scan provider Prenuvo was founded in Vancouver in 2018. For $2,499, the company sells a 45-minute session of full-body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that scans the entire body for early signs of hundreds of health conditions, including cancer, brain aneurysms, metabolic disorders and multiple sclerosis.
It’s a concept that’s won Prenuvo $176 million in investment and earnest social media endorsements from the US fashion crowd and celebrities, including Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow, Zac Posen, Lily Aldridge and Cindy Crawford, the latter of whom is also an investor. After opening its first clinic in New York City in 2023, the company has expanded into 25 clinics across North America and Australia. This week, it’s proving that the growing demand for future-facing health insights is transcontinental: it’s opened its first clinic in the UK, in London’s Fitzrovia, and already amassed a huge waitlist.
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Prenuvo represents the next frontier of preventative health tech, as our wellness obsession multiplies. Consumers are craving clinical credibility, scientific data points and personalized projections of their health, so they can “optimize” for decades into their future. The scans tend not to be covered by insurance, so represent a luxury that until now, were the preserve of Americans who were willing to pay for what the company says is a “proactive”, rather than a “reactive”, approach to health.
It’s big business: the global wellness industry reached a new peak of $6.8 trillion in 2024, and is projected to hit $9.8 trillion by 2029, according to the Global Wellness Institute. The US has been leading the way, but Europe is now catching up. Eighty-four percent of US consumers say wellness is a “top” or “important” priority, while in the UK, that figure sits at 79%, according to McKinsey research.
The key difference between the two markets is the UK’s access to public healthcare. Healthcare experts’ criticisms of scans like Prenuvo’s warn of unnecessary extra strain on public health practitioners over early detection of potentially benign conditions, and exacerbating health anxiety in an already anxious population. But Prenuvo is hoping consumers will pay to circumvent the public health system’s associated wait times, in order to get earlier insights into their health.
Prenuvo says it uses a “clinical diagnostic research-grade MRI” that’s three to four times faster than an ordinary MRI machine and can also detect hardness in organs, to make early diagnoses of hundreds of diseases, including cancer, aneurysms and even multiple sclerosis. Prenuvo CEO Andrew Lacy says that around one in 25 first scans find a potentially life-threatening condition. He markets the scan as a “screening”, which he says means Prenuvo isn’t regulated like a medical device.
Thanks to its high-profile celebrity endorsements, which the company maintains are not paid ads, Prenuvo has perhaps emerged as the most well-known of a new wave of full-body scans like Ezra and SimonOne that have launched over the last few years in the US. In Europe, the most well-known body scan option is Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko, which launched in London last year and has amassed a 100,000-strong waiting list for its AI-powered (non-MRI) full-body scans that go for a much cheaper £299.
Here, Prenuvo founder and CEO Andrew Lacy tells Vogue Business what’s different about the brand’s tech, and why he thinks there’s a need for Prenuvo in the UK.
Vogue: What is the normal customer journey to Prenuvo’s scan? Do people tend to have a hunch something could be up, or is it a real proactive wellness thing?
It’s a little bit of both. We have a lot of people that come in completely proactively, so they might be into longevity — or just into healthy living — and want to make sure that something will get caught earlier than it would in the reactive healthcare system. Then, we also have people that maybe are symptomatic, like women that have periodic abdominal pain and they’re trying to figure out, is this normal? Or they might go to their doctor and the doctor ignores them, and they’ll come in to get answers to active questions they have about their health. In some ways, it has a wide appeal, because either you are healthy and you want to stay healthy, or you’re worried you’re not healthy and you want to check. What we offer is either reassurance, or early diagnosis.
Vogue: In the UK, because of our public healthcare, we have a completely different cultural attitude from the US toward our health. So what happens when you get an early diagnosis, and how is that going to be different in the UK versus the US?
We’re in Australia, which has a system that’s similar to the UK, and we operate in Canada, which is also similar to the UK. So I would say that when you look at all of the social medicine systems, the most inefficient part — the part that takes the most time, where people are spending the most time waiting — is actually arriving at a diagnosis. It moves a lot faster once you are diagnosed with cancer, or some other serious condition. Therefore, in some ways, we are taking the step in the whole process that is the most inefficient, and helping people get through that as fast as possible, so they can get on a path to treatment a lot quicker.
Vogue: £2,499 a scan is a luxury price point. Are high-net-worth customers your main demographic?
Well, it depends. Of course, we have a lot of those people as patients, but our clinics are full of lots of different kinds of people. I think that everyone has a right to live a healthy life, and a lot of people want to invest money in ensuring that they can have as long a life as possible. So I think a lot of people look at this and they put what we do in the same category as getting a gym membership, or buying organic food. The goal of the company really one day is to have these scans be the standard of care for everyone. That would mean partnering with governments, healthcare systems, and in the US, employers, where it’s typically them that provides insurance.
Now, to do that, you have to collect a lot of evidence. So step one is to collect evidence of our outcomes and how we save on downstream costs. MRI is going to be there to do this at population scale, we just need to keep collecting enough evidence to make that happen.
We want this to be a covered service, but we want to offer it to consumers in parallel. I believe that the way to affect change in the healthcare system is for consumers to say: ‘Hey, this is important to us, this has had a meaningfully positive impact on my health, and I believe it should be part of the health system for everyone.’
Vogue: I’ve read quite a lot about very early stage tumors and things that are actually benign and could be cause for a false alarm. What proportion of the diagnoses you find are at a preliminary stage, versus later on?
We do know that there are some very small cancers that can self-resolve. But by the time you’re seeing a cancer on imaging, it tends to be at least a centimeter or bigger. Most of what we are finding is cancer, and what we’re finding is localized to the organ of origin. So it’s stage one or early stage two. In the UK health system, the average stage of diagnosis is early stage three. So that time-saving is critically important for having a better outcome for patients. That’s the real upside.
Now, over time, as we find more and more cancer, not just as Prenuvo, but as a healthcare system in general, we develop new ways to manage those patients. These days, a lot of men that have prostate cancer, they’re doing what’s called “watchful waiting”. They’re just doing imaging every year to see whether anything has changed, and you just sort of live with the condition. So I think the more you diagnose things early, the more innovation that will lead to in how we manage downstream care more effectively.
Vogue: I feel like today, there are so many things to be anxious about and we’re so obsessed with self-optimization and tracking. Is there a danger of exacerbating health anxiety among your customers?
Not as much as you would think. I would say a lot of people come in already anxious about their health, and in some ways, we provide a lot of reassurance. But what I’ve actually been really surprised by as I’ve met patients, is that when some are told they have cancer or an aneurysm, everyone reacts better than what I thought. I think we actually have a capacity for comprehension and resilience. So those fears that you have when you think about this are not actually what happens in real life when someone is going through that journey; they’re just grateful for having the knowledge earlier, rather than later. I think people switch into: ‘OK, how do I solve this thing? What do I need to do?’ It’s not as devastating a journey, I guess, that you might think, outside in.
The biggest barrier at the moment is fear. I like to talk about it because I see it in myself as well. During the day, I spend so much time talking about this. But still, I get nervous getting a health checkup. I like to tell myself that’s not a failure, it’s me being conditioned by a reactive healthcare system.
But the health system isn’t static, it adapts. Everyone struggles to get care in the UK, as they do in many health systems. And the reality is it’s because literally 70% of the budget is being spent on helping people with advanced disease. So if we could spend more money upfront diagnosing disease early, we would save so much more on the backend, not having to pay for very expensive treatments that have worse potential outcomes for patients. That’s the world that I want to create.
I believe that if every cancer was diagnosed at stage one, you’d probably have different ways of dealing with cancer and you would absolutely change the relationship that people have with their bodies. If people didn’t see a cancer diagnosis as sort of a death sentence, but they saw it as, ‘OK, I’ve got this condition and I’ve got to manage it now.’