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August 20, 2025 13 mins
Paul Corvino sits down with Andrew Lacy, the CEO and founder of Prenuvo, the company pioneering proactive whole-body imaging for the early detection of cancer and other diseases. Under Lacy’s leadership, the company has expanded across North America, establishing Prenuvo as a recognized and trusted proactive healthcare service to both patients and referring clinicians.
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is CEOs you should know with division president of iHeartMedia,
Paul Corvino.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Today I'm here with Andrew Lacy, the CEO and founder
of Perneuvo. It's a company that's pioneering proactive whole body
imaging for early detection of cancer and other diseases.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Welcome, thank you, it's great to be here.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Before we get to hear your story, your entrepreneurial journey
into how you eventually became the CEO of this company,
and will learn also more about Perneuvo, I'd like to
do a quick Q and a rapid fire question and
answer where you get your brain working and your mouth
moving awesome, ready to go? Yeah, okay, beat your ski

(00:44):
vacation Ski beatles are stones starrings of course, Tom Brady
or Michael Jordan.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
Michael Jordan, I don't understand NFL.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Okay in that case, Messi or Ronaldo, bither of them
are all? Sean Connery or Daniel Craig.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Sean Connery of course, well with what your accent.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I knew that had to come. Godfather were Star Wars.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Star Wars watched it one hundred times.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
The celebrity that people say you remind them of God.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
One of the characters from Happy Days.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
I Donny most Ralph Mouth. I see it. Well, welcome, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Great to be here. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Okay, So let's talk about where'd you grow up? I
hear the accent. Where are you from?

Speaker 1 (01:31):
So I'm actually from down Under, from Melbourne, Australia, and
I grew up in the early days of the Internet,
looking at all these websites, not realizing that this was
there were real companies behind all these pages. I'd visit
and one day I moved and visited California, and I
remember rollerblading around Silicon Valley and seeing all these, you know,

(01:52):
the early offices of Google and Yahoo.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
And when was this?

Speaker 1 (01:55):
This is early? This is about nineteen ninety eight nine,
and I moved over to the Silicon Valley shortly thereafter.
I've been here ever since.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
We're in Silicon Valley. So you were up in with
Palo Alto.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
I was living in Pale Alto and now I moved
down to la three years ago.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Very good. So what brought you? How old were you
when you when you went there? What were you doing
before you came here?

Speaker 1 (02:14):
I am so now I'm an entrepreneur, but my background
is not very traditional. I actually studied law for a while,
I worked in management consulting, and I had an MBA
which had three characteristics that I completely have no value
in the world of startups. So I started from.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Scratch, even graduating from college. There's no value in the startups.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah, well, I think the quintessential startup founder was someone
who dropped out of college and you know, created Facebook,
and I didn't have that in my resume. So I
sort of started from scratch, and you know, as a
thirty year old entrepreneur and have been building companies ever since.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
So you've got this, You've got an MBA. You said, right,
you graduated from business school, and what was your first job?

Speaker 1 (02:57):
My first job was I mean, look, my first high
school job was was bagging groceries at a Safeway store.
And from there I ended up doing, you know, doing
some consulting for companies that were trying to figure out
what to do with the Internet and how they could
respond to these new upstart companies. And that taught me

(03:19):
a lot about how to build businesses in a risk
free environment.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
For me, what were some of the companies you work with?

Speaker 1 (03:24):
They were large banks or retail companies, in Australia.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
This is when the Internet was just starting to be
you were.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
Ninety eight, ninety nine, two thousand. We're all slow in Australia,
I guess it was. It was already a thing in
the US by then, and these companies were trying to
figure out how do you respond to people that don't
have a bricks and mortar to people have a fundamentally
different cost structure, and and my job was to help
counsel them and build little businesses inside their big businesses

(03:55):
that one day would become you know, that digital storefront
would become their main business.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
And so how long did you do that for?

Speaker 1 (04:01):
For five years?

Speaker 2 (04:02):
For five years during the height of the internet boom.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, I learned a lot, but there's no I would
never risk anything of my own. I was always me
advising other companies on what to do, and of course
getting frustrated that a lot of those well I thought
were good ideas at the time, weren't getting implemented by
these big companies.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
So you had your entrepreneurial blood and you're starting to
see that you want to go on your own, is
what I'm hearing. What was the next step and how
did you do it, so, you know.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
So I moved to the Silicon Valley and my first
company was the very first iPhone company built on top
of the iPhone. So I ran the underground iPhone app store,
where you could get underground apps to put onto a
phone before there was a real app store, and really
understood that.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
How did you get the money to start that?

Speaker 1 (04:54):
We bootstrapped. We connected with a bunch of hackers that
had figured out how to break into a phone, not
to do anything crazy bad, but just to put an
app on to change the wallpaper on the background of
the phone. And we bought every single one of those
apps and had millions of users before the app store
even launched.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
And then we built it up and sold the company
and exited. We built that.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
I haven't sold the company to Disney actually just down
the road from where we are now. Oh, and then
I went together with my partner to run Disney's mobile
studios around the world.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
You sold your a company, yeah, and then you went
to run what company was that?

Speaker 1 (05:28):
Disney's mobile studios around the world. And then I left
and built a natural language search company sort of like
Siri or Lexa. Before those products were around, it was
too early and ever since then, I've been working in health.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
What made you move over to health?

Speaker 1 (05:44):
The primary reason was with that first iPhone company. I mean,
we pioneered all of the ways that we are now
addicted to phones, and our KPI ad north star was
how many hours did you spend in our apps and
typically not doing product of things? And I just wanted
to have an all star that was more meaningful. Now

(06:04):
I'm in the second half of my career, something that
I could point to and say, hey, we made a
real difference, And that's why I really wanted to focus
in on health.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Tell me a little bit now of Pernouval. What was
the idea? What was it about that that got you excited?
First of all, I'm looking at you and you're telling
me these early days in the nineties, back when I
was in that So you're you're older than you look,
so you're doing something right on the on the health front.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
So I mean, I think I have largely good genes.
In fact, how the company started was, you know, I
I think being an entrepreneur is damaging to your health.
Is very stressful. You work very hard, you don't work
out enough, you eat badly, and I work up one
day looking in the mirror and just asking myself, you know,
how do I know I'm going to be around for
this future that I'm building? And so I went on

(06:48):
a search, you know, my own health journey to get answers,
and that led me to a radiologist. So it was
doing an earlier version of the Preneow scan up in Canada,
of all places. So I was a medical tourist to Canada.
I went and got one of these scans. It took
a lot longer than it takes now, but after that scan,
I learned more about my health than the health system

(07:08):
had told me. Well. First of all, I learned that
I was not dying of anything. There was no crazy,
horrible disease under.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
The skin, so always a good start.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
I learned how the where I was living my life
was creating wear and tear to my spine, to my brain.
But most importantly, the most valuable thing I got was
peace of mind. I felt like I was bounced off
the walls for weeks afterwards, and in fact, I got
back on a plane and I spent six months at

(07:39):
that clinic, and I sat with about one hundred and
fifty patients going through the same procedure I went through.
I heard, I saw people getting told that they had cancer,
people getting all clears, people told they had wear and
tear like me. And the overwhelming emotion that I observed
was relief that people for the first understood what was

(08:01):
going on with their health.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Probably so also people whose lives were saved as they
caught things early.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Yeah, for sure, and you know, we're all a little
scared to learn about our health and we can dive
into that. But you know, post scan, it was relief
and people and sort of this feeling of empowerment that
you can actually, you know, you had knowledge that you
could then act on to have a better life.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
So tell us how you went from this to finding Bernoble.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
So we ended up partnering to take some of this
technology and continue to work on it, improve it and
speed it up and launch it around the US. And
in the last four or five years now we've opened
twenty locations.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Twenty locations. Where are these locations located?

Speaker 1 (08:43):
In all the major cities you'll find a prinivo now.
And we launched internationally. In fact, we launched a clinic
right across the road from where I went to high
school back in Melbourne, Australia just two weeks ago. So
we went. We're now multi regional.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
Where you located in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
We're on Musha, Bullvard and Bundy, so basically in Broadwood. Yeah,
and we have a clinic Capacadena. We're one in Orange County.
We're having San Diego, so we have quite a few
in southern California.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Okay, so tell me how long? What is the process?

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Yeah, so you come into one of our locations, you
fast for four hours beforehand.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
Do you have to have a meeting a pre meeting
first too?

Speaker 1 (09:19):
Typically know, unless there's something in your medical history that
we want to talk to you about. Okay, you line
these machines that are very big and spacious. The facility
doesn't feel like a medical facility.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Is it. It's like an MRI machine or.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Is it an MRI machine? And inside that machine we
have television and radio, so you can listen to iHeartRadio
while you're in there, you can watch a television show.
The procedure now takes about forty five minutes and once
you're done, you come out, you get dressed, you have
a snack because you've fasted for four hours, and a
couple of days later, we deliver you a fifteen to

(09:53):
twenty page report going through every single organ in your body.
What we see, what we don't see, and if we
see something, what you should do about.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
So tell us some of the things that you might find.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
So in the category of things that you really want
to catch early, we find cancer typically at stage one,
so solid humors anywhere in the body. We can find
aneurysms in the brain and in the rest of the body.
These often when they burst, are fatal. In terms of
chronic disease, we see very early stages of dementia, muscu,

(10:24):
sclidal degeneration, chronic digestive issues, liver conditions, kidney conditions. These
are all things that you want to catch early because
by the time where in our fifties and sixties, the
average American is dealing with one or two chronic conditions.
So if we can catch them before they've reached that
chronic stage.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
How old are you when you just start doing this
and how often should you do it?

Speaker 1 (10:48):
We have patients as young as eighteen and as old
as ninety six. And you ask the eighteen year old,
they say, I'm doing this to live longer. And you
ask the ninety six year old and they tell you
they're doing this to live longer.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
And how often should you do this?

Speaker 1 (11:02):
We recommend every year. It's an annual screening, sort of
a physical of the future. I mean, you go to
your doctor now and they look at you and they
ask you how you're feeling, and you say, I feel okay,
and they say, well, good on you. That's your anial physical.
This is a much deeper investigation to get, you know,
to get and look at places where we can identify disease.
When it's still what is the cost to do this

(11:24):
a sus at one thousand and goes to twenty five hundred.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Is it covered by insurance?

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Not at the stage?

Speaker 2 (11:28):
At the stage that should be it's one well stage
eventually because it'll save more money in the end if
you catch something.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
It's true, although I like to think of us as
insurance free. When you come in to us, you know
exactly what you're paying. When you go get a single
body part scan somewhere, you might end up paying two
three thousand dollars out of pocket and not realize.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah. Absolutely so, tell the audience how they can go
about getting this done.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
So if they go to prinive it dot com. There's
still it out pre nuvo dot com. You'll see the
twenty two locations that we have opened. You can book
online and we've arranged at promo code for your listeners.
If they go to prenuvo dot com slash iHeart, they'll
get three hundred dollars off a comprehensive spring.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Okay, have you heard that three hundred dollars off? You
go to Preneuvo p r E n u vo dot
com and put slash iHeart, slash iHeart and go in
and uh it may save your life. Yeah, thank you
so much for coming on once again. I'm here with
Andrew Lacy, the CEO and founder of Preneuvo. It's a

(12:36):
company pioneering proactive whole body imaging for early detection. They
can catch cancer and other diseases and as I just said,
it may save your life. Thank you so much for
coming on once again. Go to Preneuvo p r E
n u vo dot com, put in slash radio and

(12:59):
get yourself in a point. Man. This is Paul Corvino,
the vision president of iHeartMedia, saying thank you for listening
to another episode of CEOs. You should know.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
Listen to CEOs you should know on the iHeartRadio app.
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