Whole-body MRI raised $120 million. The radiologists' own college says don't.

Prenuvo, the whole-body MRI company, announced today a $120 million Series B co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Left Lane Capital, with investors including Cindy Crawford, Anne Wojcicki and Eric Schmidt. The base scan costs $2,499; a new Enhanced Screening bundle, with a brain-focused scan and a blood panel, is $3,999, or $4,499 in New York. The company says it has about 110,000 members, seventeen locations and fifteen more coming. The American College of Radiology does not support whole-body imaging of people without symptoms, and says there is no documented evidence that it is cost-efficient or prolongs life.

What the money is for. Prenuvo says it began a ten-year clinical trial last July to evaluate its care model. Read that sentence twice. A company that has sold scans to 110,000 people is now beginning the study that would tell it whether those scans help. That is not unusual in consumer health; it is the industry's business model in one sentence. The customers are the trial, and they are paying rather than being paid.

Loree’s take

Every whole-body scan finds something. Bodies are full of cysts, nodules and shadows that would never have mattered, and once they are on a report they have to be chased: the repeat scan, the specialist, the biopsy, the months of worry. Radiologists call them incidentalomas. The rare real catch is real, and it is the story the company tells. The far more common chase is the story the patients tell me.

Ben’s take

The celebrity investor list is the product. It tells the buyer this is what careful, successful people do. I would ask the same question I ask every consumer-health company: what does the second scan show that the first did not? If the answer is "peace of mind," the company is selling an annual subscription to reassurance at $2,499 a year, and the radiologists' college has told you what that buys.

Why it matters to a recovering optimizer. The pull of the scan is the pull of the whole trap: more data must be better, and the expensive version must be the serious one. The evidence runs the other way. Screening healthy people without a specific risk produces findings, costs and anxiety out of proportion to the harm it prevents. Whether you are healthy is mostly written in how you slept, moved, ate and connected this month — information that is free and that no magnet can read.