Waltham, Mass. — Everest Biolabs has been awarded a $2.1 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to advance automated extracellular vesicle isolation technology for large-scale biomarker studies.
The Direct-to-Phase II award will support development of a next-generation, plate-based platform designed to isolate extracellular vesicles, or EVs, from plasma with greater throughput, purity and reproducibility.
EVs are nanoscale particles released by cells that carry proteins and other biological material from the tissues where they originate. Researchers are studying them as potential sources of biomarkers for conditions affecting organs such as the brain and heart, as well as cancer.
Everest Biolabs said one of the main challenges in EV-based biomarker research is isolating the vesicles consistently across hundreds or thousands of samples while separating them from abundant plasma proteins that can obscure disease-related signals.
The NIH-funded project will focus on automating EV isolation so laboratories can process large sample cohorts in parallel with less hands-on work. The company also plans to develop next-generation Apex columns designed to produce higher-purity EV samples from complex biofluids including plasma.
“The proteins that tell us the most about disease are the hardest to see in blood, and EVs are how we get to them,” said Tal Gilboa, Co-Founder and Head of Research at Everest Biolabs and Principal Investigator on the grant. “This award lets us take the plate-based approach our team first developed at the Wyss Institute and turn it into a platform any laboratory can run: high-purity EVs from hundreds of plasma samples a day, isolated the same way every time.”
George Daaboul, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Everest Biolabs, said the grant will support efforts to make EV isolation more scalable and standardized for biomarker research, diagnostics and therapeutic development.
Everest Biolabs emerged from stealth in November 2024 and has since launched its Ascent and Summit automated EV isolation instruments, Apex SEC columns and Atlas ELISA kits for EV quantification and purity assessment.
The research is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences under NIH Award Number R44GM165165.
