Everest Biolabs lands $2.1M NIH grant to scale EV biomarker isolation
What's the deal? Everest Biolabs has been awarded a $2.1 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, part of the National Institutes of HealthDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The Direct-to-Phase II award will fund development of automated, plate-based technology to isolate extracellular vesicles (EVs) at clinical scale.
What's the endgame? The Waltham, Massachusetts company builds tools for EV research — nano-sized vesicles released by all cells that carry proteins from the tissue that produced them. Because they are particles rather than free protein, EVs can be separated from the abundant plasma proteins that mask disease signals.
Why does it matter? Protein concentrations in blood span more than 12 orders of magnitude, so mass spectrometers spend most of their capacity measuring proteins that say little about disease. The tissue-derived proteins that would signal what is happening in the brain, heart, or a tumor sit at or below the limit of detection.
The project will advance Everest's plate-based platform for processing large sample cohorts in parallel, alongside next-generation Apex columns engineered to deliver higher-purity EVs from plasma.
What they're saying: "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, head of research, and principal investigator on the award. The approach, she said, can isolate "high-purity EVs from hundreds of plasma samples a day, isolated the same way every time."
CEO and co-founder George Daaboul called the award "a strong validation of our technology," adding that "scalable, standardized EV isolation is the foundation for everything downstream, from biomarker discovery to diagnostics and therapeutics."
Why now? A Direct-to-Phase II award goes to small businesses that have already shown their technology is feasible. Since leaving stealth in November 2024, Everest has launched its Ascent and Summit instruments for automated EV isolation, the Apex family of SEC columns, and the Atlas ELISA kits for EV quantification.
The signal: At $2.1 million, the award sits in the top quartile by size for its category — a bet that removing the bottleneck in clean, repeatable EV isolation is what stands between the technology and the clinic.
Image credit: everestbiolabs.com
