52North Strengthens Leadership with Appointment of Rebecca Simmons as COO and Joe Neale as CTO

Dr Rebecca Simmons steps in as Chief Operating Officer, while Joe Neale joins the leadership team as Chief Technology Officer. Together, their experience across healthcare, deep tech, product development, and operations will bolster 52North’s execution as it scales toward regulatory approval, commercialisation, and further diagnostics innovation.

Dr Simmons brings over 20 years of operational leadership across healthcare, academia, and deep tech. Before joining 52North, she served as COO at quantum computing company Riverlane, leading operational growth and helping raise over £100M in venture capital. Her founding executive experience at the THIS Institute (The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute) and senior advisory roles at the Danish Diabetes and Endocrine Academy mark her as a leader shaped by both healthcare innovation and cutting‑edge technology.

Joining 52North from the medical and pharmaceutical manufacturing sector, Joe Neale most recently served as Chief Technology Officer and Head of Respiratory at invoX Pharma. Prior roles include VP Innovation, Product Development & Programme Management at Bespak (Recipharm), R&D Director at BTG, and Category Lead at Swiss Precision Diagnostics. His extensive track record spans IVD, medical device and combination product R&D, industrialisation and regulated manufacturing processes. Neale has bought multiple products to market across several therapeutic areas and into the hands of patients and healthcare professionals.

By combining Simmons’s operational leadership with Neale’s seasoned stewardship of product development, manufacturing scale-up and taking products through regulatory approvals to market, this represents a major step towards commercialising Neutrocheck® at scale to transform urgent care diagnostics for oncology patients.