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.
