Panelist Speaker
Saliha Durmuş received her Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD degrees from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Boğaziçi University. During her doctoral studies, she specialized in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, and with her dissertation titled “Investigation of Infection Mechanisms through Pathogen-Human Protein-Protein Interactions by Bioinformatics Approaches”, she was awarded the Best PhD Thesis Award by Boğaziçi University in 2013. She continued her academic career as a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering at Gebze Technical University. In 2020, driven by her interest in translating scientific research into clinical applications, she left academia to focus on entrepreneurship. In 2021, she was named Turkey’s first-place winner in the category of “Business, Economics, and/or Entrepreneurial Accomplishment” at the TOYP (Ten Outstanding Young Persons) awards organized by JCI (Junior Chamber International). As the Co-Founder and CEO of PhiTech Bioinformatics, she leads the development of AI-driven bioinformatics solutions based on multi-omic data for the diagnosis of rare diseases and hereditary cancers. The company’s clinical decision support platform, Genomics & More (G&M), is the first commercial platform designed to increase diagnostic yield in patients who remain undiagnosed by DNA sequencing, by incorporating RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) data. Today, with a growing number of success stories, PhiTech is focused on accelerating the global integration of RNA-Seq into clinical diagnostics through G&M.