Founder & CEO of Prenuvo on the Health Benefits of Full Body MRI Scans | Andrew Lacy

A lot of quite serious diseases that we're catching at the company, we catch them so early that the intervention is much more at the change the oil level of complexity than it is put a new engine in.

Today's guest is Andrew Lacey, the founder and CEO of Prenuvo, a transformative healthcare company growing fast across North America. Prenuvo's core innovative is a 1-hour advanced medical screening using MRI that can detect solid cancer at stage 1 and 500 other medical conditions. Prior to Prenovo, Andrew has extensive experience taking digital products from conception to launch in both his own startups, Tapulous and Zap, and large corporates like Disney, LaBarra, and various large banks and insurance companies. Andrew's education includes MBAs from Stanford University, a JD in law, and a Bachelor of Economics from the University of Melbourne, Australia.. And Andrew, for you, dear audience, has kindly offered to have $300 off your comprehensive exam. So just check out the show notes for the code. Welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast, Andrew. I'm really excited to have you on today.

Thanks, Claudia. I'm really excited to be here. That's quite an introduction on me. I've not heard that before so extensively.

Yes, and you've done many different things as I have as well, which is always great. What led you to, um, Prenuvo and what you're doing there, and why is a full-body MRI scan for preventative health and early disease detection your passion now?

Well, I think it's funny, like, um, I would say one of my characteristics that you might be able to glean from my, uh, work background is I have a very curious mind. So I like to work on a lot of different things, spanning boundaries from law to medicine to business. And I think probably I'm hopeful to some extent that that's part of the secret of longevity, is to keep your mind very active.

It is.

I hit my 40s not very long ago, and, you know, I was an entrepreneur that worked quite hard, um, carried a decent amount of probably low-level stress, um, and I started to look in the mirror and ask myself the question, you know, am I okay? Is all this effort that I'm putting into my life going to pay off? One way or the other in making the world a better place, or, you know, making a better future for myself? And I didn't have an answer to that question. So I went out and tried to learn what I could, and I did colonoscopies and genetic tests and, um, and, uh, Horvath-Cloch, uh, diagnostics and all these things. And they gave me these little point answers. They told me something, but there was nothing that told me a real comprehensive answer. Yeah, I ran into the founding radiologist at Prenuvo around this time, and I went in and did a scan, and I learned more about my health in that scan than the medical system had told me my entire life. And I really just felt like I had this visceral feeling that an entrepreneur sometimes gets, like you're seeing the future. And it became my mission thereafter to find ways to bring this technology to as many people as possible around the world.

So beautiful. And what does that journey look like? Um, how are you expanding it? What's the vision there?

So we've gone from one clinic in Vancouver, Canada, 3 years ago to now we are in 9 locations around North America. Amazing. We're opening another 4 locations this year. We're actively looking right now in Europe and the Middle East and Asia. So we're really working pretty hard to, to scale the business horizontally while at the same time kind of getting deeper and deeper into what we can learn from the scans that we're taking.

Very cool. What are some of the diseases, Andrew, you can detect early using a preventative full-body MRI scan?

So an MRI, for your listeners that may not sort of be familiar with these different modalities, it really is— it excels at investigating soft tissue in the body. So you can think of soft tissue as being all of our organs, uh, and MRI images the body. It's actually imaging hydrogen. And hydrogen is attached to water, to fat, to muscle. And by altering the frequency with which we image you, we can start to build sort of a histological picture of every little 3-dimensional, um, pixel in your body and start to really understand what is that composed of. Is it blood? Is it fluid? Is it, um, proteinaceous tissue? And that can tell us a lot about the underlying disease process that we're, that we're able to diagnose in each of the different organs. Um, it's— the scan itself is particularly good at looking for solid tumors, and the main reason for that is there's one sequence we use that's called diffusion, and diffusion really just looks for hard spots in the body. And for any woman that is told that they should feel their lumps for— feel their breasts for lumps, um, we know this works because while not every lump is a cancer, every cancer is a lump, and the same is true inside the rest of your body. And with this machine, we're able to do that digitally, obviously at a much greater sensitivity than you could with your own hands.

So for some people thinking, well, I've had an MRI on my knee, do I need a full body scan? What's the point of actually doing the full body? Because I think traditionally people would have thought it's just for maybe my shoulder or just for one part of the body. So why the full body scan? Why is that important?

Well, to start with, it's a lot more— if you know what you're doing, it's a lot faster. Than imaging every part of your body individually. In a, in a Purdue VosScan, we do, uh, we image at clinical diagnostic quality equivalent of 22 different parts of the body. And in a regular hospital facility, that might take 20 to 30 minutes for every one of those parts. So really doing it in one go enables the scan because no one wants to sit in MRI machines 20 different times over many hours to collect the same information. But then more fundamental is the idea that our bodies are not sort of a collection of parts. Our body is a dynamic system, and we can just learn a lot more about how our underlying physiology is responding to our lifestyles by looking at the entire body in one go.

Can you talk about some clients' breakthroughs, let's say? There's people that might have come in and said, you know, I just want to do a checkup, or what have been some impactful insights that clients have had?

Well, for us, it's been a real journey because if I'm being totally honest, um, we thought this scan was amazing and let's work hard to get it in as many places as possible. And we understood that AI would be an important part of that, and we're doing a lot of research in the field of AI to see if we can develop models that can diagnose disease. But in the process of doing a lot of this research, actually, we had to first start to understand where all the organs are in our bodies. They're all this squishy, and they're different sizes in your body than they are in mine. And we had to build a lot of fundamental technology just to sort of understand where things are and how big they are and the volume of organs or fat or muscle or things like this. And, and in the process of doing this, we started to get very excited about the ability of these scans to not only obviously diagnose disease early and therefore affect longevity, but at the same time tell us an awful amount of information about our bodies that can really help us, uh, alter the way that we live our lives so that we can have much better healthspan during our lives.

Can you give a few examples?

Sure. I mean, I'll give you an example that came up even yesterday, and this is, this is very anecdotal, um, but it's one of the things that I think as we collect more and more data, we may in fact be sort of furthering the field of science. Um, we started to observe actually in a couple of patients that had, uh, smaller than average calf muscles, um, they also tended to have smaller than average brain volumes. And, you know, and the theory goes that, that, uh, um, cognitive decline is a vascular problem, and that is that it's a end— it's an end result. It's the tissue being damaged because there's not enough blood supply going to the brain. And in particular, there's not enough blood supply going to the parts of the brain where Alzheimer's tends to start, which is the hippocampal region. Um, you're— you have to also have a good cardiovascular system as you age to be able to pump good supply of blood to your lower limbs. And so we're starting to see, you know, there's a potential that this may be a biomarker for, you know, for brain volume. And that's one of the exciting things. There are just so many, uh, this, this, there's so many interesting biomarkers yet to be uncovered that can really help us, uh, learn more about, again, how the way we're living our life affects our underlying health.

What are some of the other biomarkers that you, um, look at and are able to ascertain from the scan? So you mentioned cancer. Um, I think super interesting, the correlation between calf volume and brain size. I think that's phenomenal.

We've had a few brain specialists. It's anecdotal at this point, but it's one of those things where we're very interested about it. Um, we look a lot at, um, uh, fat in the body. So we carry fat obviously subcutaneously— this is the sort of ugly fat. Uh, we carry, carry fat viscera— viscerally. So this is the fat that surrounds the organs. And if you had to choose which fat to have, you would want subcutaneous fat, even though it maybe looks less appealing than visceral fat because visceral fat is much more highly correlated with heart attack risk. Or pericardial fat, so the fat around the heart, much more highly correlated with cardiovascular disease. Or fat in the liver is very highly correlated with metabolic disorders like diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So just even knowing where your fat composition and where the fat is in the body. Everyone has some, unfortunately. Where is it? Where is it hiding? It can be really useful information for someone who wants to, in between scans, work on improving their underlying health.

So what would be a typical use case? Who is your client that can come to you? And what would that protocol look like between understanding what they need to do? What are the preparation times after the scan? What is then some recommendations or protocols that you help science walkthrough?

At the moment, everyone more or less gets the same scan, so we don't yet customize it too much for the individual other than we have 3 different scans and people can go on the website and sort of review those. We have 3 types of people that come in, actually. Um, there's the, the first category are people you might expect. These are the avid subscribers to many different longevity blogs, um, who are generally quite healthy and fit, but they really want to stay in front of their health because they want to, you know, live like they're a 20-year-old well into their hundreds. Um, and that's a— that's one group of people. I see you putting your hand up. Um, the second are people that have a much higher risk for whatever reason. They might have a family member that had cancer and passed away, or a parent that had a burst aneurysm and passed away. And for them, they're using us as a— as a screening tool, but it feels much less discretionary, like not knowing what's going on with their health is, is really affecting their peace of mind. And as we know, the connection between mind and body, um, if people are not comfortable in their skin, it's going to affect their underlying health. And then the last category are people that, um, might have some indeterminate symptoms and the medical system hasn't really helped provide them with some clarity about what's going on. We have a health system that is really good at diagnosing acute problems. So, you know, if you go skiing and you break your arm, the medical system's gonna tell you that you have a broken arm. But if you have, you know, infrequent headaches or unexplained weight gains or losses, or every so often pain in your abdomen that you don't quite know what it is, the medical system is pretty slow to actually diagnose those. And people come to us in some ways to get some clarity faster. So that if there is something going on, they can really start working on making themselves healthier a lot quicker.

Do you, um, also do blood tests around that? Do you do like a full, um, holistic view, or is it purely, um, different scans?

At the moment, we're just doing the screening. Um, I highly recommend that people also get regular blood tests. I also recommend that people, especially when they get into their 40s, do at least maybe one calcium score of their heart just to make sure that they don't have a genetic predisposition to calcification. Um, but, uh, to be really good at what we do, to be world-class at whole body screening, really understand such a deep— it requires such a deep knowledge of the hardware and the software acquisition protocols, and increasingly the AI, that we've decided that that's where we really want to focus our energy and attention at this point in time.

Exciting. Is preventative MRI screening safe for everyone? Are there any cases where you would say, you know, it's, it's not a suitable candidate?

It's largely safe. There are some small number of people that who are not able to do an MRI. So these might be folks that have a pacemaker installed. There's certain implants that you might have in your spine or your, or your brain that can be problematic.. But for 99% of people, the scan is indicated and appropriate for, for them if they wish to use it to get screening for their health. The process itself is very interesting and different. So when a patient comes into our facility, it's a much different experience to what you would expect from a hospital or an imaging clinic. There are no white walls. It's very warm and inviting and calm, and it feels like a bit of a spa. The machines themselves are very open. You spend a decent amount of time with your head outside of the machine for people that might have found MRIs claustrophobic in the past. And then finally, we have streaming television inside the machine itself. So the most, the most often complaint we get these days is that they haven't finished whatever episode they are watching by the time the scan is done, which is very different to what you might expect in a sort of diagnostic hospital setting. When you go and get an MRI.

Yeah, I've heard a few complaints ahead of our interview. I was talking to a few people, they're like, oh, that tunnel is so scary, I don't want to go into it. So for people who've never had an MRI, traditionally you need to be on a little sort of movable bed, if you will, that goes into a tunnel and it can be very noisy. Some places offer music or something as well, but television is always a good distraction as well. What about people who maybe suffer health anxiety and want to know, or they're like, you know, why should I get a scan? What, what do you recommend for people who are in that sort of category of health anxiety, trying not to know about things? Why should they still pay attention to this?

A really great question, and it's sort of a hard one to have a very declarative answer because, you know, if you're not one of those people, it's often hard to understand what it would be like to be in those shoes. I mean, this is a clinical diagnostic scan, uh, so everyone learns something about their health. More often than not, those things are very early and can be treated if, you know, and I use the word treated in sort of italics because oftentimes the interventions that you need to do are changes to lifestyle, not interfacing with the medical system. Uh, for people that really are nervous about this, I guess the philosophical question I would ask people to reflect on is this idea that the reason why getting diagnosed with a disease is scary has much less to do with us than it does with the medical system. Because we, we live with a system that diagnoses disease at such an advanced stage ordinarily that that word itself, disease, is sort of associated with, um, you know, life-threatening, expensive, low probability of success, scary. And I would love, as we grow this company, to really challenge the— that definition of disease. Why does it have to be such a scary thing? Why can't we start thinking of it as, you know, early, non-medical, high probability of success, informative rather than scary, and so on? And so that's what we're sort of working towards as a company, beyond just building the business, is changing in some ways the definition that people have with medical conditions and make it one day be maybe like when you go and get your car serviced and they tell you, you know, you need to change the oil, um, that, you know, you don't— that's not a disastrous, horrible event, it's just something that you have to do. Um, and I think a lot of, a lot of quite serious diseases that we're catching at the company, we catch them so early that sort of the intervention is much more at the change the oil sort of level of complexity than it is sort of put a new engine in.

Yeah, I mean, for those listening and watching who've been following for longer, what you'll hear time and again from all the different scientists and doctors and everyone I have on, prevention is better than cure, right? So I think it's getting in there early, and this is a great modality to actually understanding if there is something that comes up as well. I had a friend who did one of these scans and they detected also like early cancer that was able to be treated. And now, you know, she's completely fine. But I think that a bit more, if you will, old school method of denial, I'm thinking sort of my parents' generation of like, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. And then it's like stage 4 cancer, you know, it's like there is an in-between place. And I think with technology, with lifestyle interventions, when caught early enough, including for dementia and Alzheimer's, that's That's the beauty of nowadays, that we can actually reverse so much if caught on time. So it's great to have modalities like this MRI scan to do it with Prenuvo as well.

Not just that, but let's give an example. I mean, this is oftentimes the first time someone looks inside their body. So we all wake up in the morning, we go to the bathroom, we look in the mirror, we know where every imperfection is on our skin, we know where every mole is we have, but we have no idea what's going, you know, what's under the skin.. And we're all unique human beings, and, um, and, uh, you know, there's a lot of interesting insight there that are not even necessarily medical conditions but are sort of, um, really helpful to know as we work to optimize our life. I'll give you an example. About 0.6% of patients that we scan have what's called a horseshoe kidney. What is a horseshoe kidney? A horseshoe— when we are Well, when we're, when we are a fetus, we actually start with one organ, and then as the fetus develops in the womb, so that, that one organ splits in two and becomes two kidneys. And in around somewhere between 1 in 200 to 1 in 300 people, it doesn't split. And so you only end up with one really big kidney that sort of looks like a seventh ab, um, if you happen to be particularly fit. And for people that have this condition, they have a higher risk of infection, and they have a slightly higher risk of kidney cancer, I believe.. And so this is something that's really interesting to know. We often— while we stay on the subject of kidneys too— we'll often see, every so often we'll see someone who might have had a very active, um, uh, time as a youngster. They might have done karate or, I don't know, kickboxing or something like this, and at some point they got injured and one of the kidneys actually died and they didn't know about it. And the other kidney grew to twice the size because at that age our bodies are still developing., and they had perfectly normal kidney function, but they only have one kidney. So they had to be— that, you know, it's interesting to know in order to be aware that you only have one, you don't have the same level of redundancy that other folks might have, and to pay a little bit more attention. So these are not medical conditions, but these are all things that make us unique, and so I think helpful to know if you want to really optimize your health.

And what about lung conditions or even the gut? Are there things that you are able to pick up on?

Yeah, sure. Um, well, let's start with the gut. So recall I said we had this special sequence that feels for hardness in the body. So, um, tumors— most tumors are hard. That's why that sequence is particularly good for looking for cancer. But that's not the only thing that's hard in the body. I don't know if you've ever had an infected finger or some— something infected on the outside of the body, and if you sort of feel it, it feels harder than the surrounding tissue. So that inflammation actually causes this hardness. And so anywhere we see inflammatory conditions in the body, we can also, uh, you know, we can see that relatively easy with, uh, with the MRI technology. So for patients that might have colitis, so this is a chronic inflammation of the colon, we'll, we'll able to see that relatively easy, um, with these scans. And what's really interesting about that condition in particular is that they can develop so slowly over the course of decades that it's pretty much impossible as individuals to be able to identify the underlying disease that's progressing. Because from one day to the next, really nothing has changed. But if you can compare you today versus you 20 years ago, you might have noticed a problem with your— or a difference in your bowel function or something like this. So these, these conditions are really hard to identify as individuals, but they're quite easy using this technology.

Could you envisage that the scan could replace, say, a colonoscopy at some point?

Definitely not. We don't advise that. And the main reason is anything that you can look at with your own eyes, or a physician or specialist can look at with their own eyes, is always going to be a better modality. And so that's why we will detect melanoma with our scans, but we don't want to. I mean, because a dermatologist would detect it way earlier. With colon cancer, we will detect colon cancer once it starts constricting the colon wall, so still localized, but we won't see the polyps that are the precancer. And of course, when you do a colonoscopy, they don't just check for cancer, but they also remove those precancerous polyps. And obviously we can't do that digitally with an MRI. So we don't recommend it replaces colonoscopy. We also at this stage don't recommend that we— that, that these scans replace mammogram. They're very complementary to mammogram. But, and other than that, anything else you can see with your own eyes, particularly if you're symptomatic, there are typically other tests that can be more appropriate.

Okay, but no, but I meant more at some stage in the future with the development of technology.

But obviously that's a bit futuristic. Possible. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's possible. I still— I mean, At the risk of oversharing, I still get colonoscopies, so I think there's a— they're a very valuable screening modality. And, uh, but at the same time, sometimes colonoscopies can't, can't visualize the entire bowel, whereas obviously you can with MRI. And, and we have found cancer in parts of the bowel that were inaccessible to scopes in some patients. So that's the possibility. Again, the technology is being complementary rather than substitute.

Yeah. For people in that peak performance health optimization states, how can using a full MRI scan help to unlock peak performance?

Well, here we start talking a little bit about the future. So we're doing a lot of active research in— we like to think of it as sort of building quantifiable biomarkers of our health. What, what do I mean by this is that when you come in for a scan today, we establish a baseline of your health. And here we were able increasingly to measure the volumes of all of your organs, the volumes of every one of your muscle groups, the volumes of, you know, the clearance of every joint in your body, this, the curve angle of every vertebrae in your spine. Um, we do a detailed brain volumetric. Now most of these are a little bit under the hood right now as it relates to consumers because, as we go through this research, we'll be going through an FDA process as well. But what's really nice is that people that come in today, we're collecting this evidence already so that when they come in subsequently, we're able to help them understand the trajectory of their health as it relates to different organs or systems of the body. Um, and the hope here is that, first of all, that feedback will help us live better lives. Um, a picture is worth a thousand words, so Um, you know, we've had people that have come in that were smokers, and it doesn't matter how many packets of cigarettes with horrible pictures of lungs that they buy at the supermarket, it's somehow different when you see pictures of your own lungs. Um, and so seeing these pictures of your body is, I think, really, really insightful. In Silicon Valley, where we opened a location 2 years ago, we have been imaging a lot of quite young people, and we're identifying a lot of MSK problems. So these are people that have problems typically in their cervical spine. They're usually asymptomatic and usually quite young. And if we showed that spine to a radiologist and asked them to guess the age of that person, oftentimes they would probably guess that that person was 15 years older than they actually are. So just by being able to see and show someone a picture of their spine and show them the little disc bulges that are starting to develop helps them understand that the way they're living their life in their 30s and 40s is going to affect their mobility most likely in their 60s and 70s. And why is that important? Because mobility is one of the most critical— or maintaining mobility later in life is one of the most critical things for actually living a long life. As soon as you lose the mobility, you tend to pass away. So it's kind of crazy to think that there are things you can do when you're in your 30s that can really affect whether you're going to live to 80 or 100. And knowing about this is just so critically important to making those lifestyle modifications.

Really, really fundamental. And catching them early as well. I mean, even Dr. Dale Bredesen of the Buck Institute, neuroscientist who has a protocol to reverse Alzheimer's and a lot of neurodegenerative diseases, he says that these diseases are 20 years in the making. So if caught on time, right, and caught early, are preventable, right? That's the beauty of it as well. So working hand in hand with things like these MRI scans is really beautiful.

The only unfortunate caveat is that a lot of the interventions tend to be the things that we already a little bit know are good for us, which is eat healthy, exercise, don't sit in front of a computer for too long, these sorts of things. But again, sometimes really seeing, being able to see the picture is the visceral moment that encourages a lifestyle change.

Yeah. Or to see what a trajectory could be like if nothing is done.

Yeah, not everyone has that epiphany moment, but some do. And for us, because we image so many people that are quote unquote normal— so in our medical system, you are normal until you have advanced disease— so we're imaging all these people that have not been diagnosed with something, and we're seeing various states, varying states of degree disease progression.. And so, you know, being able to actually diagnose these conditions a lot earlier really can sort of help our understanding of disease and what we can do about it. To give you an example of the brain, so we've now imaged so many people and so many normal brains that we've been able to construct a curve of what normal looks like. So we can basically take any skull and look at the brain inside the skull, you know, normalize it for the size of the head And we understand, or begin to understand now, what does that curve of brain volume loss look like that is normal, and what would be an abnormal amount of brain volume loss? Because as we age, probably some of the interventions that you're following yourself, you know, for the average person, they lose a certain amount of brain volume every decade. And the question you would like to know as an individual is, how is my brain volume comparing, or my brain volume loss if there is any, comparing to the average? Am I doing better or am I doing worse than the average? And And over time, I think we're going to be able to answer that question, not just for brain, but for all organs in the body.

That's super exciting. And then obviously look at protocols on how to reverse it, right, and improve it. Do you make specific recommendations, or do you say, these are your results, these are what we're seeing, speak to your medical professional about it?

Or how are your recommendations? Here, it's kind of nice to come from not the medical world to some extent, because my focus really was on building the service that I would like to have as a patient. And traditional radiology often leaves the recommendation-making to the primary care physician. And the, the problem with that is that we as radiologists see so many more conditions more frequently than a primary care provider does, that the radiologists are much more able to understand what should be the next course of action. So at Prenuvo, what we do is we not only tell you what we see or don't see, but if we see something, see something, we characterize it to the best of our abilities and we provide what we believe will be an appropriate next step. And that's useful for the patient so that they can then go and interface with the medical system from the point of view of having knowledge. So you might have heard this expression, you know, be the CEO of your own health, or, um, you know, be your, your own best health advocate. So the goal is really to enable patients to do that, but then also And frankly, physicians— and we work with hundreds of physicians— find it super helpful for them because, you know, it avoids them having to then go and figure out what should be the next step, you know, and particularly for some rare conditions that they may not see very frequently.

That's exciting. So you mentioned some developments with the AI scanning. What other plans for the future do you foresee and plan to help people prevent disease and increase longevity?

Yeah, I think that the real promise of AI, and this is where we're doing a lot of active research, is in being able to identify trends and biomarkers that radiologists otherwise can't see. So I think a lot of people are focused on AI as replacing radiologists, and I don't know if that will happen, but I think what's even more exciting is using AI to potentially sort of distill in stuff insight from this volume of data that a radiologist could never do. That for us, I think, is probably some of the most exciting research that we're doing of the company. We just published or presented, I believe, close to 20 papers in the last 6 months just looking at the brain and what aspects of lifestyle in particular were correlated with different, you know, increases or decreases with, um, of brain volume. And a lot of this was very insightful. And again, this is part of the advantage of being able to apply these very, very detailed volumetric models on brains that are, again, quote unquote, normal in the eyes of the medical profession, we can really start to learn a lot.

And that's where I think we'll be investing a lot of time as a company. That's really exciting.

Andrew, if you could live to 150 years old with excellent health, how would you spend it? I would probably just in some ways continue to do what I'm doing, which is have a curious mind, move from one sector to the next, identify cool, interesting problems that the world needs solved, and, um, you know, work hard to see if we can sort of build a better future for the people that come after us, to be honest.

What excites you most about the future of health, well-being, and longevity, um, in the coming years in a more general sense?

Well, I think coming out of COVID to be perfectly honest, I think there are two 2 important trends that are worth pointing out. The first one is, um, people came out of this period with a renewed interest in preventive health. We noticed that people that had a hard time dealing with COVID had comorbidities, and many of those comorbidities were things they didn't even know about before they got COVID. And so I think people are a lot more interested and excited to understand what's going on underneath the skin that I may not know about that I can do something about today. So we saw that even, um, I believe probably 3 or 4 months into COVID, we had the same, you know, we were growing our business, um, you know, from the time right before COVID So aside from a very small blip, I think there's been such a renewed interest and excitement in preventative health, and that's really exciting for this space, um, because as humans we can tend to procrastinate and not necessarily want to sort of, um, go looking for things that we may not otherwise feel a need to look for. The second thing, it's an interesting trend, unfortunately, is I think a lot of people started to understand that the medical system doesn't do a good job of preventative health and that we have a very reactive medical system, um, you know, and that if we want to live long, healthy lives, we sort of have to take that into our own hands to some extent. I hope that's not where the medical system evolves. I hope it evolves towards preventative care and away from reactive medicine. But I think people realize that we only have one life to live, and it's sort of— we have a responsibility to ourselves to really sort of take control and really take ownership and responsibility for maintaining ourselves in good health. And I think in the— in light of this, you're seeing not just Prenuvo but many other companies that have sort of started up to look at, you know, preventative mental health, or, you know, wearables to track sleep patterns and things like this. So I think there's just a lot of interest, and there's a lot of new and exciting companies that are starting to really have impact in this preventative health space.

And I think that's pretty exciting. It's a great place to be. I totally agree. Andrew, have you done any particular changes for preventative health for yourself? Over the last years?

Like, what are some of your new protocols? So I get imaged myself every 6 months or so. Usually I'm a guinea pig when they're, you know, in a new clinic or when they want to experiment with something. Um, I noticed— I went and raised money for this business about a year and a half ago, and I was imaging my spine throughout the process, and I, I saw my spine, my cervical spine, go from a normal curvature to pathological straightening simply because of the stress that was involved at the time of doing this fundraising. Wow. So for me, it was like such a reminder that, you know, can you imagine if, if one's life was sort of defined by chronic stress, just the impact that could have on the body? Um, and, and I could see it in my own scans. And so I went out and bought a treadmill desk. And now when I work out of my home office, I usually walk something like half a marathon while— and I have noticed that my posture is a lot better. I've noticed, and I've been able to look at my scans and see that straightening reversed back to a nice normal curvature. And for me, it was proof that, you know, these interventions can work. And I think as we, as we study more and more, we're going to learn, in fact, that a lot more things that we thought were potentially not reversible may well be able to be reversed if we can identify them early enough. I think, you know, Dale's research into dementia being a really great example of that. We thought that that was something that, you know, couldn't be reversed, but if you can identify it early enough, there are actually things that you can do. So that was my, that was my big aha moment, is like, holy cow, you know, look at my spine. That's— and I start to see the bulges now. Um, you know, I want to stop this right away.

And, uh, And it was the best investment I made, actually. Very cool. For listeners interested in understanding Prenuvo and longevity better, what online resources would you recommend they start with?

Well, it's a bit of a minefield, if I'm being totally honest. Um, people have tried to do screening for a long time, and 20 years ago they started doing screening with CT machines. So CT is a spinning X-ray. It's great for bone, it's not great for soft tissue.. And so it resulted in a lot of false negatives and also a lot of false positives. Doctors universally hated it. And then in the last 10 or so years, people have been trying to do this with MRI, but because MRI is very slow, ordinarily they only are ever able to take kind of fuzzy pictures, shall we say. And those fuzzy pictures mean that you end up having a lot of false, um, positives. So for people that want to do that research, unfortunately it's kind of hard because you really have to understand what makes for a great protocol, and you have to understand why, you know, to some extent why hardware like what we've built and customized for whole body screening is fundamentally different to the hardware that you see in a regular imaging clinic, and why the sequences that we have customized over the last 10 years are finally different to what you get off the shelf from a manufacturer.. And unfortunately, a lot of doctors don't understand that difference. And so it's really hard to assume, in fact, that individuals are able to as well. But I would just be sort of a bit cautionary about some of the things that people might say about the space simply because they don't really have sort of knowledge about how this space has evolved and changed over the last 10 years. I'd encourage people to reach out to us. We have— I have a team of people that answer questions. There's no question that we haven't heard before, and importantly, help understand whether the test is right for them. Because if someone has acute symptoms, oftentimes there's a more appropriate test, and we're more than happy to recommend sort of what we think is the right outcome for the patient. So where can people reach out and find out more about Prenovo and what you're up to? Well, unlike most medical businesses, we have a phone number on our website that you can actually call and talk to a human. So the number is 833-PRENUVO if you're in the US. You can also chat with folks on the website itself, and we also have an email address that people respond to usually very fast. So you may reach out through whichever modality is sort of your—

works best for you. Can you repeat the URL?

And we'll link all of these in the show notes as well.

It's Prenuvo, which is P-R-E-N-U-V-O. Vo.com.

Do you have any final ask, Andrew, a recommendation, or any parting thoughts or message for my audience today? The one message I would maybe leave the audience with is this question: what do we think our health system would look like in 20 years' time, or what would we want it to look like if that health system was redefined around preventive health rather than reactive medicine? And I think that's, for me, such an interesting thought process because we spend 90 5% of our healthcare dollars on reactive healthcare. So a re-engineered and re-architected health system from the ground up may look very different to what it looks like today. It may well be half the size that it is today. It may well be that we don't need so many of the drugs that we have today. It may well be, again, that sort of getting a health checkup is as easy as it is to drive your car into a shop to get a, you know, 500-point checkup on your car. And for me, I think that's really exciting because because let's face it, those of us that grew up in the '70s and '80s, I mean, we grew up with Star Trek and Star Wars and this sort of like this promise of devices that could tell us instantly what was going on with our health and fix it as quickly. And I think that's the future that we're all trying to build. And it really feels like we're now at a point where the world is starting to be ready for these other solutions.

And it's really exciting. It's very exciting. And one last question to that.

How do we fast-track that to become a reality? What's your view? I think it's worth thinking hard about how to evaluate longevity medicine or longevity interventions because we have a health system that, you know, and a system of clinical research which is very robust as it relates to incremental changes to healthcare, but doesn't work so well when you look to do transformational changes to healthcare. You'd be familiar— I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with a clinical study that's going on right now around the use of metformin, um, and for longevity. I think that's a really interesting trial, but I think what's really interesting about that trial was just how long it took them to get the funding in place to do the trial in the first place. And we must ask ourselves the question, why? Um, why is it so much more difficult to do a trial of a generic drug that potentially might lead to us living longer lives if we took it than it is to do a clinical— to get funding to do a clinical trial for a cancer drug that might extend life of a terminally ill cancer patient by a couple months. And if we, if we can answer that question, and if we can come out with a different way of encouraging funding and promoting fundamental research in the field of preventive health, I think that's how you'll accelerate, you know, the world towards a future where preventive health is at the core of healthcare.

Yeah, beautiful. And I think, you know, it's maybe even government level depending on the country, right? And just shifting the focus. Obviously, the lobby of the pharma industry is very strong, and there's billions and billions at stake, which makes it difficult. But as you said as well, I think starting from the sort of micro level of becoming the CEO of your own health and focusing on that and realizing that you're investing in yourself, your life, your future by investing in preventative medicine and measures and lifestyle interventions instead of waiting until it's too late. So lovely conversation.

Thank you so much, Andrew. Such a pleasure to have you on today.

Thanks, Claudia.

It's great to be here.