Everest Biolabs Awarded $2.1 Million NIH SBIR Grant to Advance Extracellular Vesicle Biomarker Discovery at Scale with High-Purity, High-Throughput Isolation

Direct-to-Phase II award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences will fund development of automated, plate-based, next-generation EV isolation technology for clinical-scale plasma biomarker studies

WALTHAM, Mass., Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Everest Biolabs, a pioneering life sciences company dedicated to elevating extracellular vesicle (EV) research, today announced that it has been awarded a $2.1 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Direct-to-Phase II award, an NIH mechanism for small businesses that have already demonstrated the feasibility of their technology, will support the development of next-generation, automated, plate-based EV isolation technology, aimed at a central problem in clinical proteomics: the proteins that carry the most diagnostic information in blood are buried beneath those that carry the least.

Protein concentrations in blood span more than 12 orders of magnitude, and a few dozen proteins account for most of the protein mass. Mass spectrometers therefore spend most of their measurement capacity on proteins that say little about disease, while the tissue-derived proteins that would signal what is happening in the brain, the heart, or a tumor sit at or below the limit of detection. EVs, nano-sized vesicles released by all cells, offer a way past this. They carry membrane and cytosolic proteins from the tissue that produced them, and because they are particles rather than free protein, they can be physically separated from the abundant plasma proteins that mask those signals. The barrier to EV-based biomarker discovery is the ability to isolate EVs cleanly and identically across the hundreds or thousands of samples that discovery and validation studies require.

The NIGMS-funded project will address this barrier on two fronts. Everest Biolabs will advance its automated, plate-based platform so that laboratories can process large sample cohorts in parallel with minimal hands-on time and the reproducibility required for clinical translation. At the same time, the company will develop next-generation Apex columns engineered to deliver higher-purity EVs from complex biofluids such as plasma, specifically addressing challenges in plasma-based deep proteomic and transcriptomic studies.

"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 award. "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."

"Being selected for a Direct-to-Phase II award is a strong validation of our technology and the team we have built," said George Daaboul, CEO and co-founder of Everest Biolabs. "Scalable, standardized EV isolation is the foundation for everything downstream, from biomarker discovery to diagnostics and therapeutics. This funding accelerates our mission to remove the bottlenecks that stand between EV research and the clinic."

Since coming out of stealth in November 2024, Everest Biolabs has launched the Ascent and Summit instruments for automated EV isolation, the Apex family of SEC columns, and the Atlas ELISA kits for EV quantification and purity assessment. The company continues to equip researchers with precise, scalable, and reliable tools at every step, from foundational isolation to advanced analytics.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44GM165165. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

About Everest Biolabs

Everest Biolabs, founded on technology from David Walt's laboratory at the Wyss Institute, is dedicated to excellence in EV research through a relentless focus on high-quality, easy-to-use tools for EV isolation and analytics. Our solutions enhance workflows, from foundational EV isolation to advanced analytics, enabling groundbreaking discoveries. With a vision to unlock the potential of EVs in clinical applications, we keep "science first" while fostering innovation and integrity in everything we do. Based near Boston, MA, we're here to elevate exosome research at every step.

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David Freedman
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everestbiolabs.com

SOURCE Everest Biolabs, Inc.