Dr. Tuncay Delibasi

Dr. Tuncay Delibasi graduated from Hacettepe University Medical School, one of Turkey’s leading academic medical centers, in 1993. He then completed his internal medicine residency at Ankara Numune Teaching and Research Hospital in 1998. Furthering his specialization, Dr. Delibasi pursued an endocrinology fellowship at the School of Medicine, Ankara University, which he completed in 2003.

Dr. Delibasi expanded his expertise overseas as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California’s (UCLA) Department of Pharmacogenomics and Clinical Pharmacology from 2004 to 2006. He then moved to Miami to serve as a research fellow at Miami University’s Center of Pharmacogenomics, while also visiting the Diabetes Research Center’s Islet Cell Transplantation Unit in 2006. He further visited ISMETT’s Islet Cell Transplantation Unit in Palermo in 2008.

Returning to Turkey, Dr. Delibasi founded and directed the Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism at Diskapi Teaching and Research Hospital from 2008-2015. He also took up a professorship at Hacettepe University’s School of Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine in 2011.

Dr. Delibasi also established the Cell Therapy & Regenerative Medicine & Genomic Research and Application Center (ADACELL) at Diskapi Teaching and Research Hospital. This innovative center, the first and currently the only one of its kind in Turkey, regularly performs human islet cell isolations for research purposes. Additionally, he served as the deputy director and board member of Hacettepe University’s Advanced Medical Technology Education, Application and Research Center from 2014-2015.

Notable roles Dr. Delibasi has held include the chairman of the human ethics committee and the chairman of the experimental animals ethics committee at Diskapi Teaching and Research Hospital. He served as a member of the cellular therapies and stem cell ethics committee of the Ministry of Health of Turkey from 2011-2015.

He has actively participated in many professional organizations such as serving as the president of the Ankara Diabetes Association and the Pancreas Islet Cell Research Society. He is a board member of the Stem Cells and Cellular Therapy Association, and currently sits on the board of trustees at the Stem Cell Foundation.

Dr. Delibasi has led over 20 international clinical trials as principal investigator and has been a steering committee member and country coordinator in several of them. He is currently studying a rare condition, homozygous leptin deficiency, in a Turkish family, supported by NIH for research into leptin biology and the effects of leptin replacement therapy.

An accomplished author, Dr. Delibasi has published more than 400 journal articles, books, book chapters, and scientific presentations, and has delivered more than 100 teaching presentations. He has received more than 20 research grants relating to endocrine, genetic, complex diseases, obesity, and stem cells.

Currently, he is visiting Harvard University as a scientist to conduct a collaborative project on diabetes and obesity.

Research at Harvard

He was visiting professor at Harvard Medical School at the Division of Endocrinology in 2016. In the meantime, he worked at Boston Childrens Hospital in Boston, MA. He involved in a research about the role of BRD7 in embryo development and glucose metabolism.

He also conducted a collaborative project about diabetes and obesity.