Top: photo courtesy of Mount Sinai Health System
Welcome to our series on the plethora of careers in pharmacy. Aniwaa Owusu Obeng ’11 is senior director of the Mount Sinai Pharmacogenomics Program at the Mount Sinai Health System in Manhattan. She is a leader in a burgeoning new field that explores how individual patients’ DNA contributes to their responses to medication. She is also the first associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai with a PharmD (rather than an MD, DO, MBBS, DDS or PhD) – another way she is blazing a path for pharmacists.
Is it accurate to say you’re in a new position in a new field that you are helping to create and develop?
Yes, it's completely new. I'm the founding director for the Pharmacogenomics Program that Mount Sinai Health System is investing in. I've been here doing this kind of work on a much smaller scale for almost 12 years. Since 2023, I have been doing it on the health-system level.
You’re a clinical pharmacogenomicist. What does someone in your position do day to day?
Because the discipline is fairly new, there are a lot of things we have to build from scratch. My day is never “typical.” It spans from education to clinical implementation to research.
I teach pharmacogenomics to genetic counseling students in the master’s program and to medical students through the Icahn School of Medicine. A decade ago, I started a pharmacogenomics APPE (Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience) rotation. Two years ago, I established a pharmacogenomics certificate program for pharmacists and pharmacy residents; this year, we've opened it up to non-Mount Sinai pharmacists.
My goal for the near future is for every Mount Sinai patient to have pharmacogenomics testing done at some point. To support that initiative, we need more health-care professionals who are knowledgeable about pharmacogenomics. That's why I started the pharmacy training program.
I'm also working with a team of digital health experts to develop tools to move these goals along – engineers, software developers, geneticists, physicians and others. We've designed a pharmacogenomics mobile application for patients. We call it PharMe. We are starting recruitment for patients to test that app in February.
I also do some discovery and observational research through the Mount Sinai BioMe biobank.
So it is very different day to day, depending on what the objective for that month is – sometimes it's the objective for that week.
A lot of your work seems entrepreneurial in nature.
Very much so. We’re prepping to do pitch competitions, and we’re trying to get students involved. I have students who are with me longitudinally to work on these different projects.
You followed an unusual path to find this career. Could you briefly tell us how you got here?
It was out of pure curiosity. I had applied for a PGY2 (postgraduate year two); my coresident during my PGY1 also applied for a PGY2. Neither of us matched with our first-choice PGY2 residency program.
He had originally applied to the University of Florida for their transplant program. When he didn't match, they emailed him and said, “We are starting a precision medicine program. Would you be interested in that?” I had applied to Mount Sinai for PGY2. When I didn't match, they reached out to see if I was interested in a transplant program they had just started; I wasn't. So, we switched emails. I followed up with his University of Florida email, and he followed up with my Mount Sinai email, and we both got those positions.
What did you like about precision medicine?
I’m someone who cannot do the same thing over and over. The precision medicine field was novel – it was rapidly evolving and challenging. I just said, “That's for me.” I didn't know it would open up all these doors.
I came to work with bioinformaticians to develop new technology. Building new reference guides, clinical decision support and educational materials is where my passion lies. The field has allowed me to do that because there aren't many experts like myself in this space.
One question we typically ask for the Compounding Success series is what kind of student or young professional would be well suited to your field. Can you answer that, given how quickly your field is developing?
You have to be someone who likes to challenge the norms and standards. When I got the PGY2 pharmacogenomics position, I told my friends I was so excited, and almost everyone said, “What are you doing? You’ll never find a job.” The whole point for most of us at the time was to get a residency, then a great job and move on with our lives. And they couldn't conceive that I would be going into a PGY2 program, spend an extra year in residency and not get a job afterwards – because who was hiring for a pharmacogenomics pharmacist back then? No one, honestly.
But for me it was something that I embraced. I said, “If I don't get a position, I'll come back and be a clinical pharmacist, or I can work in retail pharmacy again.”
The pharmacy students I tend to attract with the pharmacogenomics rotation at Mount Sinai are very driven. They tend to be high achievers. They come in ready to break the norms. It's about the drive and the desire to do something novel.
You found your way to something for which you are well suited when it was in its formative stages. Given that experience, what advice would you give to a student choosing clinical rotations or deciding what to do after graduation?
When I was finishing school, I had very different rotation experiences. I had one with Medicare Part D, I had one with Novartis, I had one at a kidney dialysis center. I wanted to test it all out. At one of my rotations, my preceptor encouraged me to apply for a PGY1 program because she thought I could excel in one. I heeded her advice and secured an interview in that same institution. Lo and behold, I matched with them, and that's not something I went there to do.
So I would say: Take a step back, pray about it and think through what you want to do when you go out there. But don't put down any experience. Embrace new things.
You're going to be in this career for a long time. What do you really want out of the profession? Is it to make money? You can do that in many places. But if it's impact you want, it needs to be something that you are passionate about, something that drives you.