Everest Biolabs has been awarded a $2.1 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to develop automated technology for isolating extracellular vesicles at clinical research scale.
The Direct-to-Phase II award is an NIH funding mechanism available to small businesses that have already demonstrated the feasibility of their technology.
Everest will use the funding to develop next-generation automated, plate-based extracellular vesicle isolation technology for plasma biomarker studies.
Extracellular vesicles, or EVs, are nanoscale particles released by cells that carry membrane and cytosolic proteins from the tissues that produced them.
Those particles can provide researchers with potentially valuable information about diseases affecting organs including the brain and heart, as well as tumors.
One challenge in blood-based biomarker discovery is the enormous range in protein concentration.
A relatively small number of abundant proteins represent most of the protein mass in blood, potentially masking less abundant tissue-derived proteins that could provide more useful information about disease.
EVs provide a potential way to separate those signals because they can be physically isolated from abundant free proteins.
Everest’s NIH-funded project will focus on making that isolation process reproducible across hundreds or thousands of samples.
The company will advance an automated plate-based platform capable of processing larger sample cohorts while reducing hands-on time.
Everest will also develop next-generation Apex columns intended to produce higher-purity EVs from complex biofluids including plasma.
Since emerging from stealth in November 2024, Everest has launched its Ascent and Summit automated EV isolation instruments, Apex SEC columns and Atlas ELISA kits for EV quantification and purity assessment.
KEY QUOTES:
“The proteins that tell us the most about disease are the hardest to see in blood, and EVs are how we get to them. 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.”
Tal Gilboa, Co-Founder and Head of Research at Everest Biolabs and Principal Investigator
“Being selected for a Direct-to-Phase II award is a strong validation of our technology and the team we have built. 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.”
George Daaboul, CEO and Co-Founder of Everest Biolabs
