Advisory Board

Dr. Ivan K. Dimov

The ScienceDaily article New blood analysis chip could lead to disease diagnosis in minutes said

A major milestone in microfluidics could soon lead to stand-alone, self-powered chips that can diagnose diseases within minutes. The device, developed by an international team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, Dublin City University in Ireland and Universidad de Valparaíso Chile, is able to process whole blood samples without the use of external tubing and extra components.
 
The researchers have dubbed the device SIMBAS, which stands for Self-powered Integrated Microfluidic Blood Analysis System. SIMBAS appeared as the cover story March 7 in the peer-reviewed journal Lab on a Chip.
 
“The dream of a true lab-on-a-chip has been around for a while, but most systems developed thus far have not been truly autonomous,” said Ivan Dimov, UC Berkeley post-doctoral researcher in bioengineering and co-lead author of the study. “By the time you add tubing and sample prep setup components required to make previous chips function, they lose their characteristic of being small, portable and cheap. In our device, there are no external connections or tubing required, so this can truly become a point-of-care system.”

Ivan K. Dimov, Ph.D. is Postdoctoral Associate, BioPoets, University of California, Berkeley. He is also Visiting Instructor at Stanford University and Cofounder at Blobcode Technologies Ltda. His current research interests include Micro Total Analysis Systems (microTAS), microfluidics, and fully integrated micro-devices for cell based assays.
 
Ivan was born in Bulgaria. He has worked on and done research in several fields such as system automation, mobile robotics, artificial intelligence, neural network and visual cortex modeling, and intelligent industrial sensor systems.
 
He coauthored Stand-alone self-powered integrated microfluidic blood analysis system (SIMBAS), Hybrid integrated PDMS microfluidics with a silica capillary, and Integrated microfluidic tmRNA purification and real-time NASBA device for molecular diagnostics.
 
Ivan earned his B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering in 2004 and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science in 2004 as well, both at Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, Chile. He earned his Ph.D. in Applied Biophysics at Dublin City University, Ireland in 2009. Read his LinkedIn profile.