Salma Tammam

Salma Tammam earned her PhD in Nanomedicine from the University of Bonn, Germany, in 2016, having spent over fifteen years applying nanotechnology and biotechnology to develop improved therapeutics and diagnostics. Between 2014 and 2016, she served as R&D Manager at D-Kimia Diagnostics, an Egyptian startup using gold nanoparticles to detect Hepatitis C, and later became an associate professor at the German University in Cairo, leading a national diagnostic research consortium.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Tammam worked within Egypt's national effort to build an affordable domestic testing system, and watched the country's testing infrastructure struggle — not primarily because of cost, but because the underlying model had been designed for high-income settings with stable supply chains and reliable cold-chain refrigeration, conditions that simply do not exist across much of the Middle East and Africa. She concluded that making the same flawed design cheaper would never be enough; the diagnostics themselves needed to be rebuilt from scratch for the conditions that actually exist.

Tammam founded Reme-D, a Cairo-based biotech company developing molecular diagnostic tests for diseases including tuberculosis, HIV, hepatitis and HPV, engineered to remain stable at room temperature and manufactured from locally sourced materials up to six times more affordable than imported alternatives. Since launch, Reme-D has commercialised 30 diagnostic products and supplied over 550,000 tests across Egypt, Kenya and Sudan, raising $1.45 million in pre-Series A funding in 2026 to expand manufacturing capacity tenfold and reach new disease areas including genetic diseases and cancer.