AusDoc 20th Mar | Page 8

8 NEWS

8 NEWS

20 MARCH 2026 ausdoc. com. au

Eucalyptus sold for $ 1.6 billion

Jamie Thannoo A PUBLICLY listed US telehealth
company with a $ 3.6 billion
market cap will pay $ 1.6 billion for Eucalyptus, the Australian company behind telehealth sites prescribing GLP-1 receptor agonists.
It launched in 2018, with its main website, Juniper, originally an online clinic for general women’ s health before focusing completely on GLP-1 receptor agonists, which it prescribes currently for $ 349 a month. It has been controversial. The RACGP has repeatedly accused it of fragmenting care, while the TGA investigated its advertising in 2023— even the Uniting Church took it to court over alleged copyright infringements of its logo.
Eucalyptus says it has treated more than 775,000 patients across Australia, the UK, Germany, Japan
FAIRFAX
and other countries, with a predicted 2026 revenue of $ 635 million.
Its buyer, Hims & Hers, is another semaglutide-prescribing telehealth company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Tim Doyle founded
Eucalyptus in 2018.
It said the Eucalyptus websites would be rebranded to Hims & Hers over time and Eucalyptus co-founder Tim Doyle would take over Hims & Hers’ international operations.
Regarding the sale, Mr Doyle wrote on social media,“ In the future, patients will have a relationship with one or many digital clinics, where they understand their own health data through regular
Eucalyptus websites will be rebranded to Hims & Hers.
tracking and diagnostics [ and ] use that information to interact with a variety of practitioners.”
Aside from Juniper, Eucalyptus has a men’ s health website called Pilot, where patients can seek scripts for weight loss, hair loss and erectile dysfunction; a fertility treatment
site called Kin; and a skincare site called Software.
Mr Doyle told The Australian Financial Review in 2025 that weight-loss drugs generated about 12 times more revenue than skincare and fertility.
In 2024, Eucalyptus launched Compound, a $ 1000-a-month“ men’ s performance” service, which offered continuous glucose monitors to men without diabetes.
It counts former deputy chief medical officer Dr Nick Coatsworth as a clinical adviser.
It had been one of the main clinics prescribing compounded semaglutide before the Federal Government banned the practice.
Hims & Hers continues to sell compounded semaglutide in the US, which has pitted it against semaglutide maker Novo Nordisk.

AI mammography‘ cuts interval cancers by 12 %’

Bella Rough AI-ASSISTED mammography screening reduces interval cancers by 12 % compared with standard screening, according to final results from a world-first trial.
The Mammography Screening with AI trial, which was embedded within Sweden’ s national breast screening program, involved 105,934 women aged 40-74.
For about 53,000 women, a commercially available AI scored their mammograms from 1 to 10 for cancer risk. Those ranked 1-9 went to a single radiologist reading, while those ranked 10 went to a double reading.
The AI also highlighted suspicious lesions and calcifications, but these were only shown to radiologists if patients had a risk score of 8-10. Women in the control group underwent a double radiologist reading.
Interval cancers— cancers not detected at screening but diagnosed between screening rounds or within two years of the last scheduled screen— occurred in 82 women in the AI group and 93 in the control group, marking a 12 % reduction. The researchers said screening with AI led to fewer invasive interval cancers than standard screening( 75 vs 89), which reflected its higher sensitivity for invasive cancer detection( 80.5 % vs 73.8 %).
The AI group also had 27 % fewer nonluminal A subtype interval cancers and 21 % fewer large tumours appearing as interval cancers.
Screening with AI led to fewer invasive interval cancers.
Sensitivity for detecting in situ cancers was slightly lower in the AI group— by about one percentage point— resulting in three additional in situ interval cancers compared with standard screening.
Similar numbers of grade I ductal carcinoma in situ lesions were detected in both groups, indicating that the higher number of grade II and III ductal carcinoma in situ lesions in the AI group was not overdiagnosis, the researchers wrote in The Lancet.
However, the AI pathway increased detection of luminal A cancers in screening rounds by 21 % without a corresponding reduction in luminal A interval cancers, which researchers acknowledged did raise concerns about overdiagnosis and overtreatment.
The AI system was also associated with a 44 % reduction in screen-reading workload.
Lancet 2026; 31 Jan.