The company was founded in 1974 by Donald "Don" Comb, a Harvard Medical School professor, as a cooperative laboratory of experienced scientists and initially produced restriction enzymes on a commercial scale.

In 2005, he was replaced as chief executive by James Ellard, though Comb continued to serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

[2][12] He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Allen Sharp for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing.

[14] The multi-product Rowley Cleanroom Manufacturing Facility makes GMP-grade products and has a 10,000-sq-ft mechanical mezzanine.

[16] In December 2017, the company released the NEBNext Ultra II FS DNA library prep kit for next-generation sequencing (NGS).

[18] The kits offer specific depletion of the RNA species that interfere with the analysis of coding and non-coding RNAs.

[23] NEB’s nucleic acid purification products have been used in various studies, including: New England Biolabs developed a colorimetric loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay for research use.

[35] In 2001, NEB co-founded the marine DNA library Ocean Genome Legacy (OGL), which according to the Boston Globe, “catalogues samples of organisms from all over the world, to be made available to scientists for research”.

[36][37][38] To enable point-of-use sales of its reagents, NEB created a digital interface for enzyme-housing freezers to be used at customer storage sites, through a partnership with Ionia Corp. and Salesforce.com.

[42] NEB will supply a version of its Rapid PNGase F technology to aid in increased sample preparation and improve process throughput.

[42] That same month, NEB entered a partnership with Bioz, Inc., an artificial intelligence technology company, to provide its customers with access to examples of real-world applications of its products.