Patients are lining up for $2,500 full-body MRI scans that can detect cancer early
Prenuvo MRI machine
Courtesy of Prenuvo
While celebrating the July Fourth holiday last year on a boat in Tyler, Texas, Dr. Julianne Santarosa received the results from her full-body MRI scan. What she saw put a damper on the festivities.
Radiologists at Prenuvo, which performed the scan, had identified a nodule in her lungs. Santarosa, who works as a spinal access surgeon in Dallas, could see the spot circled as she looked at the images from the patient portal on her phone.
“I was like, unless I swallowed a taco chip, that something should not be there,” she told CNBC in an interview.
Before paying $2,500 for the Prenuvo scan, Santarosa, who was 41 at the time, hadn’t felt any pain in and around her lungs and had no reason to suspect anything specific was wrong. Rather, she’d felt generally off since going through in vitro fertilization and had a gut feeling she should do the scan after seeing a Prenuvo ad on Facebook.
The day after seeing her Prenuvo results, Santarosa had a follow-up CT scan at a local hospital. The nodule was cancerous. She had it removed the following week.
Curious and concerned patients like Santarosa are flooding Prenuvo’s nine clinics in the U.S. and Canada. There’s so much demand that the 5-year-old Silicon Valley-based company has announced 11 more locations opening by 2024, including one in London and another in Sydney.
Kim Kardashian called Prenuvo a “life saving machine” in an August post on Instagram that’s generated more than 3.4 million likes. Actress and model Cindy Crawford is an investor, alongside Google ex-Chairman Eric Schmidt, 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki and Nest Labs founder Tony Fadell. The company raised $70 million late last year in a funding round led by Felicis Ventures.
Prenuvo CEO Andrew Lacy said he wants to help customers understand what’s going on beneath their skin, which his company’s technology can do by identifying more than 500 conditions like cancer, multiple sclerosis and brain aneurysms. As of now, the scans have a limited audience because they aren’t covered by insurers, requiring patients to pay out of pocket.
For Santarosa, the imaging was worth every penny and more. Her cancer was detected early enough that she didn’t need to undergo treatments like chemotherapy or radiation. More importantly, it hadn’t spread to the point that it was life threatening.
“There’s no screening test for this,” Santarosa said. “I would’ve been stage 4. I would’ve figured this out when I was coughing up blood.”
Prenuvo CEO Andrew Lacy
Courtesy of Prenuvo
An MRI, which stands for magnetic resonance imaging, is traditionally used when ordered by a doctor. Interpreting the images is a complex science, and the scan alone can take more than an hour, even if it covers just part of the body.
Prenuvo’s custom MRI machines, which received clearance 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 complete, the images are reviewed by one of the company’s 30 licensed radiologists. Customers usually receive their results back within five to 10 business days.
Waitlists are long. According to Prenuvo’s website, the next available slot for a full-body scan in New York is in March. The same is true for the Los Angeles clinic. In the Dallas suburb of Irving, there’s availability starting in mid-December.
Lacy said the business has spiked as awareness in the past 12 months has grown “incredibly.”
“These days, 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 scan of just the torso for $1,000.
‘Old-fashioned scaling’
Lacy said Prenuvo is working to bring prices down through “old-fashioned scaling.”
Some companies have started offering Prenuvo scans as a perk for employees, which has helped increase access to the technology. Lacy said it works for companies with self-funded insurance plans, because they’re able to customize their offerings while assuming the risks.
Traditional insurance companies are paying attention.
“Over time, that data helps inform insurance companies about whether this should be something that would be covered across the insurance plans that they offer,” Lacy said.
Prenuvo is looking for other ways to lower costs through artificial intelligence and by potentially reducing the durations of the scans even further. Lacy said the cost is directly correlated to the amount of time customers spend in the expensive machines.
Prenuvo MRI machine
Courtesy of Prenuvo
Radiologists are at the core of Prenuvo’s business. That brings its own challenges.
Many radiologists are fighting burnout as an aging population has led to mounting caseloads. Emerging technologies like AI have also discouraged some young physicians from pursuing the practice. By 2034, the U.S. could see an estimated shortage of up to 35,600 radiologists and other specialists, 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 who want to work for the company. In traditional medicine, radiologists are often diagnosing patients with serious and advanced diseases, so identifying conditions early can be a welcome change, he said.
“When you’re catching stage 1 cancer, what you’re doing will save lives,” Lacy said.
Prenuvo is still in its early days. Medical experts caution that, in addition to the steep price, full-body MRI scans won’t catch everything and aren’t meant to replace targeted screenings like colonoscopies and mammograms.
“It is a tool that your physician and you can use, but it does not replace a full diagnostic examination,” said Dr. Jasnit Makkar, an assistant professor of radiology at Columbia University Medical Center, in an interview. “It is a work in progress.”
Dr. Kimberly Amrami, vice chair of the department of radiology at Mayo Clinic Rochester, said that because of the limitations, patients’ expectations have to be set accordingly. She said it can be challenging to identify lesions in the lungs, for instance, and scanning different body parts like the knee, the pelvis, the breasts and the prostate all require different techniques.
“There’s always a wish to do an exam that’s going to answer every question,” Amrami said in an interview. “It’s just not really the way that it works with MRI in particular, because the way that you evaluate different body parts in different disease states is quite different.”
Prenuvo doesn’t use contrast, a heavy metal that’s injected into the blood vessels, when conducting its scans. Contrast can help radiologists visualize certain conditions better, but there’s controversy surrounding its use, and the company doesn’t want to deter people.
Lacy said Prenuvo’s hardware was designed to do “almost as good a job” as contrast by using other techniques.
“We believe that that’s the best possible solution for screening patients who are at normal risk and asymptomatic,” he said. “If we find something that’s very concerning, oftentimes, we will suggest that the patient gets some type of follow-up dedicated imaging that might involve contrast.”
Amrami said people should consult with their physicians to determine what kind of imaging works best for them.
“There is no one-size-fits-all for MRI,” Amrami said.
A look inside a Prenuvo clinic
Prenuvo’s clinic in New York City, New York.
Courtesy of Prenuvo
Lacy said he was inspired to create Prenuvo after he started to wonder about how his high-stress lifestyle was affecting his body. He previously started an internet search company and helped found a gaming company, among other ventures.
He found a radiologist who was offering an early version of a full-body MRI scan. Lacy said he learned a lot from that experience.
“Although my lifestyle was impacting my health, there was nothing crazy going on,” Lacy said. “I remember just this incredible feeling of peace of mind.”
Prenuvo designed its experience for relaxation. Its New York location has the feel 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 into scrubs and remove their jewelry.
While lying down in the machine, patients are given a pair of headphones and can choose to listen to music or watch TV during the scan.
Dr. Eduardo Dolhun, a family physician in San Francisco, decided to get 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 going through his results with a Prenuvo radiologist, Dolhun called one of his medical school peers at the Mayo Clinic.
“I think this is going to change medicine,'” Dolhun said, recalling the conversation.
Dolhun said he gets a scan every 18 months or so and recommends it to some of his patients. He still advises them to get screening exams like physicals and mammograms as well.
“Good science takes time,” he said.
Tesla displays Optimus next to two of its vehicles at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Aug. 22, 2024.
CNBC | Evelyn
Tesla’s vice president of Optimus robotics, Milan Kovac, said on Friday that he’s leaving the company.
In a post on X, Kovac thanked Tesla CEO Elon Musk and reminisced about his tenure, which began in 2016.
“I want to thank @elonmusk from the bottom of my heart for his trust and teachings over the decade we’ve worked together,” Kovac wrote. “Elon, you’ve taught me to discern signal from noise, hardcore resilience, and many fundamental principles of engineering. I am forever grateful. Tesla will win, I guarantee you that.”
Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.
In a first-quarter shareholder deck, Tesla said it was on target for “builds of Optimus on our Fremont pilot production line in 2025, with wider deployment of bots doing useful work across our factories.”
During Tesla’s 2024 annual shareholder meeting, Musk characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” then claimed the humanoid robots would lift the company’s market cap to $25 trillion at an unspecified future date.
In recent weeks, Musk told CNBC’s David Faber that Tesla is now training its Optimus systems to do “primitive tasks,” like picking up objects, open a door or throw a ball.
Competitors in the space include Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, 1X and Figure.
Kovac had previously served as the company’s director of Autopilot software engineering. He rose to lead the company’s Optimus unit as vice president in 2022.
Musk personally thanked Kovac for his “outstanding contributions” to the business.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
President Donald Trump holds a news conference with Elon Musk to mark the end of the Tesla CEO’s tenure as a special government employee overseeing the U.S. DOGE Service on Friday May 30, 2025 in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.
Tom Brenner | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Tesla has been facing massive challenges trying to get back on track after a disastrous first quarter. Those headwinds strengthened considerably this week.
CEO Elon Musk officially concluded his term with the Trump administration at the end of May, hitting the 130-day mark, the maximum time allowed for a “special government employee.” On his way out the door, Musk expressed sharp criticism of the Trump’s signature spending bill that’s being debated in Congress due to its expected impact on the national debt.
What started off as a policy disagreement quickly escalated into an all-out online brawl, with Musk and President Donald Trump hurling insults at one other from their respective social media platforms. After Musk called the “one, big beautiful bill” an “abomination” and rallied his followers on X to “kill the bill,” Trump said Musk had gone “CRAZY” and threatened to end government contracts and cut off subsidies for Musk’s companies. Musk responded, “Go ahead, make my day.”
The rift sent Tesla shares plummeting 14% on Thursday, wiping out roughly $152 billion in value, the most for any day in the company’s 15 year-history on the public market. While Musk is still the richest person in the world on paper, his net worth plunged by $34 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
More importantly, the spat brought about the collapse to a relationship that blended business, politics and power in a manner virtually unprecedented in U.S. history. The ramifications to Tesla, which fell out of the trillion-dollar club on Thursday, could be severe, and not just because Trump is reportedly considering selling or giving away the red Model S he purchased in March after turning the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom.
A senior White House official told NBC News on Friday that the president was “not interested” in having a call with Musk to resolve their feud.
Ire from the Trump administration could influence everything from future regulation, investigations and government support for Tesla, to decisions on tariff exemptions the company has been seeking in order to purchase Chinese-made manufacturing equipment.
Tesla shares were badly underperforming the broader market before the Musk-Trump breakup. Revenue slid 9% in the first quarter from a year earlier, with auto revenue plummeting 20%, due to the combination of increased competition from lower-cost EV makers in China and a consumer backlash to Trump’s political activities and rhetoric.
It’s certainly not what Tesla shareholders were expecting, when they sent the stock up about 30% in the days following Trump’s election victory in November. After spending close to $300 million to return Trump to the White House, Musk was poised to have a major role in the administration and be in position to push through regulatory changes in ways that benefited his companies.
Instead, his company has suffered, and Musk’s behavior is largely to blame.
One of his most divisive actions in leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was the dismantling of USAID, which previously delivered billions of dollars of food and medicine to more than 100 countries.
Beyond the U.S., Musk has endorsed Germany’s far-right extremist party AfD, and gave a gesture that many viewed as a Nazi salute at an inauguration rally.
In response, in recent months, there were numerous cases of vandalism or arson of Tesla facilities or vehicles in the U.S., as well as waves of peaceful protests at Tesla stores and service centers in North America and Europe.
Advertisements in protest of Musk have appeared in New York’s Times Square, and at bus shelters in London, urging people to boycott Tesla, some labeling the company’s EVs as “swasticars.” The Vancouver International Auto Show even removed Tesla from its exhibitors’ list fearing the company’s presence would cause safety problems.
On top all that are President Trump’s sweeping tariffs, which have led to concerns that costs will increase for parts and materials crucial for EV production. In its first-quarter earnings report in April, Tesla refrained from promising growth this year and said it will “revisit our 2025 guidance in our Q2 update.”
Board is mum
Pension funds that invest in Tesla have said the “crisis” at the company requires a leader to work a minimum of 40 hours per week to focus on solving its problems.
Public officials are echoing that sentiment, and calling on Tesla’s board to take action.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said on Thursday in s statement to CNBC that the “schoolyard fight” between Trump and Musk highlights how “Tesla’s weak accountability measures and poor governance threaten not only the company’s financial stability and shareholder value, but also the future of homegrown EV production.”
Brooke Lierman, comptroller of Maryland, told CNBC in an email that the company’s board “is not doing its job to ensure that there is a CEO at Tesla who is putting the company’s interests first.”
Since Musk’s name is synonymous with Tesla, the board needs to ensure that Tesla can stand on its own regardless of who’s leading the company, she added.
“Musk’s behavior continues to threaten the future of Tesla,” Lierman said. “As long as Tesla is identified with Elon Musk and he continues to be a polarizing figure, he will continue to damage the brand which is a huge part of Tesla’s value.”
Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment. CNBC also reached out for comment to board chair Robyn Denholm and directors and executives who work in government relations and in the office of the CEO. None of them responded as of the time of publication.
Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.
CNBC
Tesla investors focused on business fundamentals are justified in their skepticism.
The company has failed to roll out innovative and affordable new model EVs, while Chinese competitors like BYD have flooded the market, particularly in Europe.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs on Thursday lowered their price target on Tesla mostly due to the outlook for 2025. Deliveries this quarter are tracking lower for the U.S., the analysts noted, while European sales saw a 50% year-over-year decline in April and another double-digit drop in May. China sales from those two months were down about 20% from a year earlier.
Quality is also a problem. Tesla has announced eight voluntary recalls of the Cybertruck in 15 months due to a range of issues including software bugs and sticking accelerator pedals.
Robotaxi ready?
Musk is urging investors to largely ignore the core business and look to the future, which he says is all about autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.
But even there, Tesla is behind. In AVs the company has ceded ground to Alphabet’s Waymo, which is operating commercial robotaxi services in several U.S. markets. After a decade of missed deadlines, Musk has promised a small launch of a Tesla driverless ride-hailing service in Austin this month.
The Austin robotaxi service will operate in a geofenced area, Musk said in a recent interview with CNBC’s David Faber, and will begin with a small fleet of just 10 to 20 Model Y vehicles with Full Self-Driving (FSD) Unsupervised technology installed. If all goes well, Musk has said, Tesla will try to rapidly expand its driverless offerings to other markets like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
What consumers won’t be seeing anytime soon are the Cybercab and Robovan vehicles that Tesla touted at its “We, Robot” event last year to drum up customer and investor enthusiasm.
On Friday, Milan Kovac, Tesla’s vice president of Optimus robotics, announced he was leaving after joining the company in 2016. Musk thanked him for his “outstanding contribution” in a post on X.
Still, there are plenty Tesla bulls and Musk fanboys who are believers in the CEO’s vision. The stock’s 4% rebound on Friday is a sign that some saw an opportunity to buy the dip.
“I think the real story here is the investor base of Tesla literally doesn’t care about anything,” Josh Brown, CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management and CNBC PRO contributor, told CNBC’s “Halftime Report” Friday. “This is still a nothing matters stock.”
FundStrat’s Tom Lee said the Tesla selloff was “overdone.”
Tesla’s market cap, which is dramatically inflated relative to every other U.S. car maker, is built on Musk’s vision of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots doing factory work and babysitting our children, while self-driving Cybercabs and Robovans make money carting around passengers.
Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas wrote in a note this week that, “Tesla still holds so many valuable cards that are largely apolitical,” pointing to what he sees as the company’s “AI leadership, autonomy/robotics, manufacturing, supply chain re-architecture, renewable power, [and] critical infrastructure.”
In terms of Tesla’s existing business, the most immediate impact from what’s happening in Washington D.C., is the rollback of EV credits in the current budget bill that Musk loudly opposes and that’s struggling to find sufficient support in the Senate. There’s also the matter of the tariffs and whether Tesla is able to get preferred treatment, a proposition that seems increasingly unlikely with the Musk-Trump fallout.
Matthew LaBrot, a former Tesla staff program manager, told CNBC that he’s not surprised that Musk blew up his relationship with the president. LaBrot was terminated earlier this year after sending an open letter in protest of Musk’s divisive political activity.
“I am devastated for the country and the climate, though Elon only has himself to blame,” LaBrot said in an interview. “Back a loose canon, expect stray canon fire.”
Tesla investors can’t know at the moment how much of Musk’s energy and time will now return to his lone public company, and the business responsible for the vast majority of his wealth. Even without politics, he still has SpaceX, AI startup xAI and brain tech startup Neuralink, among other businesses.
As of Thursday, Musk still had a West Wing office that hadn’t been cleaned out, two administration officials told NBC News. The space will likely be packed up in the coming days, one of the officials said.
And while his time in the Trump camp may be over, Musk has called on his followers to form a new party in the U.S.
“Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” he wrote on X on Thursday, in a post that’s now pinned at the top of his page. According to the post, 80% of 5.6 million respondents to the unofficial poll said “yes.”
Musk’s actions this week may have caused a permanent rift with the president. But one thing is clear — his company can’t get away from the White House.
The Docusign Inc. application for download in the Apple App Store on a smartphone arranged in Dobbs Ferry, New York, U.S., on Thursday, April 1, 2021.
Tiffany Hagler-Geard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of DocuSign tanked 18% in trading on Friday, a day after the e-signature provider reported stronger-than-expected earnings but slashed its full-year billings outlook.
Here’s how the company performed in the fiscal first quarter, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 90 cents, adjusted, vs. 81 cents expected
- Revenue: $764 million vs. $748 million expected
Billings, a closely-watched sales metric, came in at $739.6 million in the fiscal first quarter, which ended April 30. That was lower than the $746 million expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount. It also fell short of the company’s own forecast, which guided for billings between $741 million and $751 million.
For the current fiscal year, DocuSign said it expects billings of $3.28 billion to $3.34 billion, down from a range of $3.3 billion to $3.35 billion.
In the first quarter of DocuSign’s 2026 fiscal year, revenue jumped 8% year over year to $764 million. Subscription revenue increased 8% from the same period a year ago to $746.2 million.
DocuSign reported net income of $72.1 million, or 34 cents per share, compared to net income of $33.8 million, or 16 cents per share, a year earlier.
For the fiscal second quarter, the company expects revenue to be between $777 million and $781 million, compared to consensus estimates of $775 million, according to LSEG. For the full fiscal year, DocuSign projected revenue of $3.15 billion to $3.16 billion. Analysts were expecting $3.14 billion, according to LSEG.
The company also announced an additional $1 billion stock buyback, taking its share repurchase plan to $1.4 billion.
DocuSign shares are down more than 16% year to date.
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