The Medicines Patent Pool announced today that it has appointed Charles Gore as new executive director. Gore is founder and former president of the World Hepatitis Alliance.

According to the MPP press release, Gore was the first president of the European Liver Patients Association from 2004 to 2006. He will take office at the MPP in July.

He succeeds Greg Perry, who left in December after four years.

With the World Hepatitis Alliance, founded in 2007, Gore worked with key countries on three World Health Assembly resolutions, “culminating in the global agreement to eliminate viral hepatitis by 2030,” according to the release. “The World Hepatitis Alliance has become the largest membership-based hepatitis patient group globally, with 250 member patient organisations from more than 90 nations.”

“Mr. Gore takes the reins of the MPP at a crucial juncture,” the MPP said, as it is about to announce its five-year strategic plan next month on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly.

Also to be released by the MPP are the findings of its feasibility study on the potential expansion of its model to include patented medicines which are on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines.

Gore, from the United Kingdom (as was Perry), was a former hepatitis C patient. In a 2010 post on the World Hepatitis Alliance website, he recounted his struggle with the illness first diagnosed in 1995.

Gore was selected by the MPP Governance Board, headed by Marie-Paule Kieny, a French researcher and former senior official at the World Health Assembly.

The Medicines Patent Pool “is a United Nations-backed public health organisation working to increase access to HIV, hepatitis C and tuberculosis treatments in low- and middle-income countries,” according to the MPP. It works to “prioritise, forecast and license needed medicines and pool intellectual property to encourage generic manufacture and the development of new formulations.”