Everest Biolabs Receives $2.1M NIH Grant

Everest Biolabs has announced a $2.1M Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to develop automated, plate-based tools for isolating extracellular vesicles from plasma. The Direct-to-Phase II project is aimed at a practical obstacle in biomarker discovery: researchers need to recover low-abundance biological signals without carrying so much albumin, immunoglobulin, and lipoprotein contamination into the analysis that those signals disappear.

The NIH RePORTER record independently confirms the project, award number R44GM165165, contact principal investigator Tal Gilboa, and a project period running from September 1, 2026 through August 31, 2028. Everest announced $2.1M as the total grant value, while the current federal record lists $1,153,043 for the first FY2026 budget year. That distinction matters because a multi-year grant total and a single-year obligation are related numbers, not interchangeable ones.

What the NIH Grant Funds

The project is titled "High-yield, High-purity Extracellular Vesicle Isolation Columns for High-throughput Plate-based Biomarker Discovery and Diagnosis." According to the NIH abstract, Everest Biolabs will combine size-exclusion chromatography with affinity-based depletion of common contaminants. The work is organized around improving the isolation material, adapting it to a 24-well plate format, and validating the combined approach for higher-throughput processing.

The target is not simply faster sample preparation. A large biomarker study needs hundreds or thousands of samples to be handled in a way that makes the resulting measurements comparable. Every manual transfer, variable flow rate, and uneven contaminant load can become another source of batch variation before a mass spectrometer or another analytical instrument begins interpreting the biology.

The grant gives Everest Biolabs a defined development program for converting a promising method into laboratory infrastructure. It funds optimization and validation, not a declaration that the method has already achieved clinical utility, regulatory approval, or commercial dominance.

Why Extracellular Vesicle Isolation Is Difficult

Extracellular vesicles, or EVs, are membrane-bound particles released by cells. They can carry proteins and other molecular material that reflects the tissue and cellular state from which they originated, which makes them attractive for biomarker research. Blood plasma, however, is crowded with proteins and particles that can co-isolate with EVs and obscure the low-abundance signals researchers want to measure.

That creates a stubborn trade-off among yield, purity, throughput, and reproducibility. A process can recover many vesicles while bringing too much contamination with them, or produce a cleaner sample while losing part of the population under study. The MISEV2023 consensus guidelines emphasize detailed reporting, contaminant assessment, and quality control because isolation choices directly affect how an EV experiment can be interpreted and reproduced.

Everest's NIH project addresses that problem through dual-mode chromatography. The federal abstract says preliminary work combined size-exclusion chromatography with antibody-based depletion of lipoproteins, then preserved EV yield while eliminating more than 99% of those contaminants. The funded aims extend the approach to albumin and immunoglobulins and place the materials into a format compatible with automated liquid-handling systems.

From Wyss Research to a Commercial Platform

The project has a direct research lineage. A 2025 peer-reviewed paper by Tal Gilboa, Dmitry Ter-Ovanesyan, and collaborators described high-throughput plate-based EV isolation using size-exclusion chromatography and automation. Everest Biolabs says the company was founded on technology from David Walt's laboratory at Harvard's Wyss Institute, and Gilboa now serves as the grant's principal investigator as well as Everest's co-founder and Head of Research.

George Daaboul, CEO and co-founder, and David Freedman, President, COO, and co-founder, previously built NanoView Biosciences, which Unchained Labs acquired in 2022. At Everest, the team has assembled a product stack around EV sample preparation and analysis. The Ascent instrument automates column-based isolation for 1 to 8 samples, while the Summit platform is designed for 4 to 48 samples using plates or columns. The Apex family provides the isolation media, and Atlas ELISA products support EV quantification and purity assessment.

Those specifications are company-reported product capabilities, but they make the commercial strategy legible. Everest is building across a workflow rather than selling one isolated component. The grant extends that workflow toward complex plasma samples and studies where repeatability across a large cohort matters as much as the performance of an individual run.

What This Means for Biomarker Discovery

Biomarker programs often attract attention at the point of detection: the assay, the sequencing platform, or the model that finds a pattern. The quality of the answer still depends on what entered the instrument. If the sample-preparation layer changes across sites or batches, the analysis can become very precise about variation introduced by the workflow itself.

That is why the Everest Biolabs grant matters beyond a single product roadmap. It finances the less visible infrastructure between a promising biological signal and evidence that can survive larger studies. Standardizing EV isolation will not prove that a particular biomarker works, but it can make it easier to determine whether the signal is real, repeatable, and worth carrying toward a diagnostic program.

The company's announced $2.1M grant is also different from its private financing. An SEC Form D filing shows that Everest sold $4.35M of a separate equity offering beginning in February 2026, but it does not disclose the investors or assign a round label. The private capital can support the company; the NIH award is tied to a specific technical program with a named PI, public aims, and a federal project period.

The Operating Test Ahead

Everest Biolabs now has to make purity, yield, and throughput coexist in a workflow that laboratories can run consistently. That requires more than a convincing prototype. The columns, plate format, automation, recovery, and downstream assays must behave predictably across the sample variation and operating conditions that appear when research leaves one expert bench.

If Everest succeeds, its value will not come from making extracellular vesicles sound more exciting. The field already has biological ambition. The commercial opportunity sits in making the evidence cleaner, the workflow repeatable, and the handoff from sample to answer sturdy enough for the next laboratory to trust.