Everest Biolabs has received a $2.1 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Direct-to-Phase II grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award will support development of automated extracellular vesicle (EV) isolation technology for large-scale biomarker research.
The Waltham, Massachusetts-based life sciences company plans to advance a plate-based platform designed to process large numbers of plasma samples in parallel. The project will also support development of next-generation Apex columns intended to improve EV purity when working with complex biofluids such as plasma.
Extracellular vesicles are nanoscale particles released by cells that carry proteins and other biological material. Researchers are studying EVs as potential sources of biomarkers, but isolating them consistently and at scale remains a technical challenge, particularly when abundant plasma proteins can interfere with downstream proteomic and transcriptomic analysis.
Everest Biolabs develops tools for EV isolation and analytics. Its product portfolio includes the Ascent and Summit automated isolation instruments, Apex size-exclusion chromatography columns and Atlas ELISA kits for EV measurement and purity assessment.
The company was co-founded by George Daaboul, David Freedman, Dima Ter-Ovanesyan, Tal Gilboa and David Walt. Gilboa, Everest Biolabs’ Head of Research, is the principal investigator on the NIH-supported project.
