Ed Byrd has significantly impacted the way athletes enhance strength and performance. He is responsible for introducing the first ergogenic compound for strength athletes, creatine monohydrate. Byrd has been awarded six patents and is associated with multiple clinical trials.
He was also the first to commercialize the nitric oxide product known as NO2™, which generated the highest sales revenue in the history of GNC’s Sports Nutrition Division in the last 50 years, thus creating a new category in a second new category in the sports supplement industry.
Both categories to date have generated over $16 billion in wholesale sales and can be found worldwide in 100,000 retail outlets.
Byrd began his career with Don Tyson and Associates, the pioneer of Ajinomoto crystalline, free-form amino acid formulas for strength athletes. He rose to VP of Sales and Marketing at Champion Nutrition, which became Muscle Milk ®. He then developed Aminovar™, a crystalline, free-form amino acid formula that included ZMA, with the eight essential amino acids plus high levels of leucine to stimulate muscle protein synthetic rates (MPSR).
Byrd then co-founded and served as president of Experimental & Applied Sciences (EAS), where he was responsible for commercializing creatine monohydrate. Creatine has also made significant inroads into research on brain disease. The introduction of creatine in 1992 has generated over 110 clinical studies and over 100 million kilos have been sold as of 2020.
He went on to found the Medical Research Institute (MRI), which was responsible for the invention and manufacturing of Glucotize™, a first in the world controlled-release alpha-lipoic acid for the treatment of diabetic complications.
Byrd is currently creating the next new industry category known as caloric restriction mimetics, which have an anticipated life cycle value of over $300 billion.
Ed Byrd,
Founder of EAB Labs