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A day after Greg Perry resigned as executive director of the Medicines Patent Pool, the pharmaceutical industry announced today that he will join the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) as an assistant director general.

The IFPMA press release says Perry will join in mid-February 2018 and “will have responsibility for IFPMA’s external outreach and stakeholder engagement in global health topics including innovation, access, and the international regulatory environment.”

The release says Perry will join “the re-vamped” IFPMA leadership team of Thomas Cueni, who became its director general in February 2017. Perry will work alongside Fumie Griego, who joined IFPMA from Merck and PhRMA in Washington, DC in May as assistant director general for strategic planning, policy and research.

The new team at IFPMA also includes James Pfitzer as director of the global ‘Access Accelerated – Moving NCD Care Forward’ initiative, who joined from the World Health Organization, and Helen Gallagher as director of Communications.

“I will be joining IFPMA at an exciting time – where the role … of the private sector as a major player in achieving universal healthcare is now regarded as essential. I have worked in a range of roles in the healthcare arena during the course of my career, but universal health care has been at the core of all of them. I very much look forward to joining the strengthened IFPMA leadership team and bringing solutions from another perspective,” Perry said in the release.

It is notable that IFPMA, traditionally a bastion of the innovative pharmaceutical industry, is expanding to include an expert with ties to the generics industry.

The release states: “Prior to his role as Executive Director of the Medicines Patent Pool, which he joined in 2013, Greg Perry was Director General of the European Generic Medicines Association (1999 -2013) in Brussels. Previously he worked as a partner in a UK public affairs company as a European Union policy advisor to corporate and non-governmental organisations, and before that as a Parliamentary Advisor to Members of the European Parliament.”