Prenuvo’s Polaris Study Suggests Whole-Body MRI Could Fill Gaps Left by Current Cancer Screening Guidelines

Presented at AACR 2025, the study highlights the potential of proactive MRI screening in detecting overlooked cancers and other serious conditions

Prenuvo, known for its full-body MRI scans focused on early disease detection, has unveiled compelling results from its Polaris study, a real-world clinical investigation of over 1,000 mostly asymptomatic patients. Presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2025, the study underscores the promise of whole-body MRI as a complementary tool to traditional single-cancer screening methods.

Among the 1,011 participants, Prenuvo’s whole-body scans identified biopsy-proven cancers in 2.2% of cases, many of which involved types often missed by current screening protocols, such as kidney, bladder, and ovarian cancers. Such cancers are typically not detected until symptoms emerge, limiting treatment options.

“The Polaris findings represent a highly promising early milestone towards validating an imaging-based multi-cancer detection strategy using Prenuvo’s whole-body MRI screening,” said Dr. Yosef Chodakiewitz, Medical Director of Primary Care Radiology at Prenuvo and Chief Radiologist for the Hercules Project. “We are enabling screening-based detection of cancers that traditional single-cancer screening methods often overlook—allowing for earlier detection and targeted management at stages when treatment can be far more effective.”

The study showed that when scans came back clear, there was a 99.8% negative predictive value, offering patients reassurance that no detectable cancers were present at the time of imaging. For those flagged with findings leading to biopsy, nearly half turned out to be cancer.

The scans also uncovered a wide range of other serious but often silent conditions, such as aneurysms, non-cancerous brain masses causing intracranial pressure, and metabolic disorders.

Conducted at a single clinic in Canada, Polaris is part of a larger effort to validate whole-body MRI as a scalable screening approach. Follow-up studies, including Prenuvo’s Hercules project, a 100,000-person observational study, are already underway to assess how whole-body imaging can affect long-term health outcomes and improve access to care. One key focus of this work will be developing systems like ONCO-RADS and Clinically Significant Diagnoses (CSD) to help physicians interpret MRI results more precisely and determine when intervention is warranted.

 “No single test is perfect,” said Dr. Chodakiewitz. “But when strategically employed as complementary instruments, whole-body MRI and traditional single-cancer screening methods may synergistically enhance our ability to detect disease early, potentially creating better opportunities for less invasive curative treatments.”