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CENT — Practo Founder Shashank ND's AI Prevention Startup — Has Just Opened India's First Clinical Prevention Centre in Delhi-NCR

By Darshan S, Editor · 24 June, 2026 · 2 min read

Darshan S, Editor — CENT — Practo Founder Shashank ND's AI Prevention Startup — Has Just Opened India's First Clinical Prevention Centre in Delhi-NCR

Summary

  • CENT Expands to Delhi-NCR: Practo Founder's AI Prevention Centre Brings Clinical-Grade Early Detection to Gurugram
  • CENT, founded by Practo's Shashank ND, has opened India's first clinical Prevention Centre in Gurugram following its April 2026 Bengaluru launch, running the CCNM protocol of cardiac, cancer, neurological and metabolic screening.

"Early detection cannot be a side feature of a multi-purpose diagnostic centre. It needs its own infrastructure. We found that 3% of our 2,000 scans flagged critical conditions requiring immediate intervention — primarily among individuals without symptoms. That is the population we exist to find."

CENT, the preventive healthcare startup founded by Shashank ND — co-founder of Practo, India's largest digital health platform — has expanded to Delhi-NCR with the opening of what is described as India's first clinical Prevention Centre in Gurugram, following the company's flagship Bengaluru centre launch in April 2026. BioSpectrum India reported the Delhi-NCR expansion on June 22, 2026, marking CENT's entry into the National Capital Region and its first move beyond its Bengaluru home.

CENT's model is deliberately narrow in scope and deliberately deep in execution. The company runs a single standardised screening protocol — the CCNM Protocol, covering Cardiac, Cancer, Neurological, and Metabolic conditions — delivered through a tightly integrated workflow that combines whole-body MRI, ultra-low-dose cardiac CT, DEXA scan (for bone density and body composition), electrocardiography, and more than 120 blood and biomarker tests. Each prevention session is designed as a single, comprehensive assessment of a person's risk profile across the four disease categories that account for the vast majority of premature mortality in India.

Why Prevention Needs Its Own Infrastructure

Anshul Khandelwal, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer at CENT, articulated the company's central premise in its April Bengaluru launch: early detection cannot be a side feature of a multi-purpose diagnostic centre. It needs its own infrastructure. The contrast CENT draws with conventional diagnostic labs or hospital check-up units is structural: shared equipment, fragmented test menus, and varying clinical depth produce inconsistent, incomplete prevention assessments. A facility purpose-built for a single screening protocol, operating at the throughput and quality control of a specialised centre, can deliver a qualitatively different clinical product.

The Bengaluru centre — spanning 7,000 square feet at a Bengaluru location — uses imaging and diagnostic infrastructure from Siemens Healthineers, with whom CENT deepened its strategic partnership alongside the April launch. The collaboration goes beyond equipment supply: CENT and Siemens Healthineers are co-developing preventive imaging protocols and deploying software to improve scan efficiency and diagnostic accuracy — a partnership structure that aims to lower per-scan costs as CENT scales toward its 15-city expansion target.

What the First 2,000 Scans Found

CENT's clinical validation data from its partner-led network — which had conducted over 2,000 scans across seven cities since early FY26 — provides some of the most compelling evidence for the preventive health infrastructure thesis. Of those 2,000 scans, 26% revealed clinically meaningful findings that the individuals were unaware of. More strikingly, 3% flagged critical conditions requiring immediate clinical intervention — primarily among individuals who presented as completely asymptomatic. In a cohort of 2,000 people who felt healthy enough to seek a preventive scan, 60 people had conditions requiring urgent medical attention that they did not know about.

In absolute population terms, if CENT achieves its goal of 10 million scans by 2035, a 3% critical finding rate would mean identifying 300,000 people with critical silent conditions — people who would otherwise have presented to the healthcare system at a far more advanced and expensive stage of illness, if they survived long enough to present at all.

The Delhi-NCR Expansion

The Gurugram centre follows CENT's stated expansion roadmap: Bengaluru flagship, then Mumbai and Delhi-NCR, then scaling to 15 cities in India over the medium term. Delhi-NCR is strategically logical: the NCR's large corporate population, high average income levels, and growing health-awareness consumer base create the demand profile that CENT's premium prevention service targets. The region also has a significant corporate wellness market — employers covering prevention screenings under corporate health plans — that represents a potential B2B revenue channel alongside direct consumer bookings.

The Preventive Health Investment Context

CENT's expansion reflects a broader trend that BHC Media has tracked throughout 2026: India's emerging preventive healthcare infrastructure investment wave. The combination of rising NCD incidence (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and neurological conditions are all on rising trajectories in India's urban population), increasing consumer willingness to pay for proactive health management, and technology-enabled screening platforms creating genuinely new clinical products is creating a market that did not meaningfully exist five years ago.

"BHC Perspective"

At Bengaluru Health Community, CENT's Delhi-NCR expansion is a story about Bengaluru's healthtech ecosystem creating national-scale preventive healthcare infrastructure. Shashank ND built Practo in Bengaluru. He is building CENT in Bengaluru. The pattern of Bengaluru-originated healthtech companies scaling nationally from a Bengaluru base is one BHC Media has tracked consistently — and CENT is one of the most clinically substantive examples. For BHC founders in preventive health technology, early detection platforms, or clinical data infrastructure — CENT's CCNM protocol and its 26% clinically meaningful finding rate from 2,000 scans is the proof-of-concept that preventive health is not a wellness category. It is a clinical category.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is CENT and who founded it?
A: CENT is a preventive healthcare startup founded by Shashank ND (co-founder of Practo) that runs a single standardised screening protocol — the CCNM Protocol (Cardiac, Cancer, Neurological, Metabolic) — through purpose-built prevention centres. Now operational in Bengaluru and Gurugram (Delhi-NCR).

Q: What does CENT's CCNM screening include?
A: Whole-body MRI, ultra-low-dose cardiac CT, DEXA scan, ECG, and 120+ blood and biomarker tests in an integrated single-session protocol. Powered by Siemens Healthineers imaging infrastructure under a deepened strategic partnership.

Q: What did CENT find in its first 2,000 scans?
A: 26% of scans in asymptomatic individuals revealed clinically meaningful findings; 3% flagged critical conditions requiring immediate intervention. CENT's goal is 10 million scans and 1 million lives saved by 2035.