Ed Byrd
Ed Byrd has transformed the performance sports nutrition and dietary supplement industry over the course of a 40-year career with the introduction of two of the top three supplement categories: Creatine (over 100 million kilograms sold since 1992) and nitric oxide (trademarked NO2). Byrd's formulations have garnered the attention of major pharmaceutical companies, universities, and Nobel Prize winners, including Bristol Myers Squibb, Elan Pharmaceuticals, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, UCSF, University of Nottingham, and Baylor University. Byrd has been awarded six patents and is associated with multiple clinical trials.
Ed Byrd began his career in 1981 with Don Tyson and Associates, pioneers of crystalline, free-form amino acids and amino acid formulas. He rose to VP of Sales and Marketing at Champion Nutrition, which ultimately became Muscle Milk®. He then founded the California Body Club in 1987, developing a crystalline, free-form amino acid formula with the eight essential amino acids, featuring high levels of leucine. This was sourced from the biotech corporation, Ajinomoto. During this time, Byrd enhanced this formulation by adding zinc monomethionine and magnesium aspartate, used widely today for athletic performance and known as ZMA.
In 1992, Byrd co-founded Experimental & Applied Sciences (EAS), which commercialized creatine monohydrate for strength athletes, selling over 100 million kilograms. 700 million bottles have been sold since 1992. The introduction of creatine generated over 110 clinical studies and is now being tested for its application to neurological diseases. EAS also introduced hydroxymethylbutyrate (HMB) in 1996, used to enhance athletic performance. EAS was acquired by Bill Phillips, author of the bestselling book, “Body for Life”, and founder of Muscle Media 2000.
Byrd went on to found the Medical Research Institute (MRI) in 1996, inventing and manufacturing Glucotize™, the first controlled-release alpha-lipoic acid for the treatment of diabetic neuropathies. Byrd licensed Glucotize™ to the doctors-only supplement company Xymogen. Glucotize became their number-one selling product.
Most notably, Byrd originated and developed NO2(™), the first nitric oxide agonist to improve athletic performance. NO2 generated the highest sales revenue in the history of GNC's Sports Nutrition Division (5% of GNC's gross annual revenue in 2004), thus creating the nitric oxide category industrywide. Byrd's book NO2: The 21 Day Transformation (Medical Research Institute, 2002), sold over 750,000 copies.
In 2003, Byrd began investigating Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (nuclear receptor proteins that serve as transcription factors regulating gene expression) for athletic performance. He contracted a biotech company to synthesize PPAR delta (GW-501-516) at a cost of $10,000 per gram for investigational purposes. In 2005, Byrd introduced a PPAR alpha agonist to enhance the NO2 formulation, known as NO2 Platinum(™). (In 2008, the Salk Institute published the first study to turn “couch potato mice into marathon runners” using GW-501-516.)
In 2006, MRI introduced Pterostilbene, the methylated version of Resveratrol, to the analytics and specialty food ingredient company Chromadex. In 2007, Byrd teamed up with Glanbia to introduce the first eNOS agonist to enhance blood flow, the third generation of NO2, known as the “NO2 Black Label(™).”
In 2012, Byrd founded EAB Labs to study exercise signals responsible for mitochondrial biogenesis and epigenetic changes. EAB Labs also engaged in a joint venture with specialty chemical company Evonik Industries on a novel process for the development of pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ) that now has GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) approval.
