Oluwatoyin Areo

I attribute my success to God, to family, and to my ability to motivate myself. There have been times when there's nothing physically present to drive me, but I would say God has been very faithful to me with being able to make some of those changes in my career journey and in life generally. I have built so much resilience and doggedness over the years - being able to talk in rooms where nobody has an expectation to see someone that looks like myself, being able to advocate for myself, and being able to keep looking for the opportunities that would make me stand out. When I think about how a young girl that comes from a similar background to myself would have certain thoughts and maybe some doubts about herself, I believe by being able to be a picture to her to help her know that her dreams are valid and they're achievable - those are some of the things that drive me.

The best piece of advice I've ever received is believing in yourself. If you can think it, you can make it happen.

I would say, believe in yourself. Make sure that you keep your voice and you keep your self-esteem, even on days when the room tries to dampen your voice or tries to dampen your self-esteem. Keep your voice - those two things are very important. Make sure that you are technically sound. It's not enough to just have a university degree. You want to make sure that over the years, you're able to keep in touch with new innovations and developments in the field, so that when you sit in rooms and you need to have conversations, you're up-to-date with the appropriate type of information that you require to move things forward. Have a mindset that is easily adaptable to change, because in my current field, changes happen very quickly. Over the years, we've seen different breakthroughs in medicine, and there are still a lot more of those breakthroughs to come. To be able to deliver, you need to have a mindset that can change quickly from how things were done before to how they should be done now. With the recent adaptations of AI and machine learning, you also want to make sure that you're able to use those tools very quickly and make recommendations to your company on the new themes that should be included in the ways of working.

There are a couple of major challenges. One of them is meeting demands of innovative medicine - manufacturing typically has its issues, and we can easily take the weight loss medications as an example. Meeting the demands of the people that want this medicine is one major challenge. We've seen a couple of companies that make the weight loss medicines introducing different variants and acquiring new manufacturing sites, all to be able to meet up with the demand of the medicines. The second major challenge is pricing. Pricing in the U.S. is a bit multifaceted, because we have pricing based on troubles with insurance companies, and there's also the pricing based on some of the manufacturing and tariffs for some of the manufacturers that still happens overseas. If you bunch these two challenges together, it becomes the burden of the patients, because the patients, if they cannot get the drugs that they need at the right time due to manufacturing challenges, that's a problem for them. A lot of people don't have access to insurance, or insurance that are interested in covering the medicines that they need to keep them healthy, or we have issues with the gene therapy and some oncology medications that have their prices inflated.

My values are centered around my love for God. Being honest is one very important part of my values. I love honesty above all else, no matter how dark or whatever it is, just come clean - don't try to paint a picture of something that isn't true. I value people. I think there's not a way to achieve success without people, so I value relationships, whether this be professional relationships or family and friends. I value healthy and good relationships.