Professor Gareth A. Wallis
Interim Head of School
Dr Gareth Wallis - Staff Profile. Dr Wallis is an Exercise Scientist with major interests in Nutrition and Metabolism.
Fuelling athletes at scale
fuelsync® helps athletes tailor their fuelling strategies through cutting-edge science. Find out how the venture grew from a university innovation to an international service.
When Professor Gareth Wallis’s endurance-fuelling test, fuelsync, featured on the University’s news pages this spring, the story was about the science of a breath test that tells athletes precisely how much carbohydrate their body can use mid-race. University of Birmingham Enterprise was instrumental in helping transform a lab test into a business operating across three countries.
fuelsync is a breath test that tells athletes precisely how much carbohydrate their body can use mid-race.
- fuelsync is a breath test that tells athletes precisely how much carbohydrate their body can use mid-race.
Professor Wallis first came across the Operating Division (OD) model at an Enterprise roadshow session on routes to commercialisation. It appealed to him because it let him test demand without betting everything on a limited company. “It’s very high risk to just try and set up your own limited company without any background,” he says. “The OD model provided a framework to develop the commercial ideas in a way that has a lower risk, a lower exposure on an individual level.” Enterprise handles the legal and financial administration, whilst Wallis was able to find out whether people will actually pay for the test.
Based on fuelsync's need to scale quickly, this test case has demonstrated feasibility. The service runs on a franchise-style model, where Birmingham sets the standard and handles all the analysis, while partner laboratories in Munich and Slovenia deliver the physical testing locally. “University of Birmingham as the originators of the test would essentially be the headquarters,” Wallis explains, “but to achieve scale, it’s going to be very difficult to do that with one site.” Behind the scenes, Master Service Agreements allow fuelsync to issue standing “work packages” to each partner rather than negotiating a fresh contract for every new client.
Enterprise’s impact can also be seen in how fuelsync talks to the world. Enterprise funding paid for website development, and the UoBE team helped shape the messaging conveyed across professional and social media platforms. Their expertise in science communication to the general public has been central to the growing profile of fuelsync.
The trickiest problem was processing and managing money. Unlike most ODs, which sell services to companies or labs, fuelsync also sells directly to individual athletes. University systems were not built to take card payments for lab tests. Enterprise worked with the university's retail arm to build a dedicated fuelsync storefront inside the University's existing online shop.
The low-risk structure provides the agility required to allow fuelsync's ambitions to evolve mid-project. Early conversations with professional sports teams revealed that many have testing equipment at their training camps but not the expertise to run it, so Wallis is now exploring a 'flying service', sending a small team to camps for a few days at a time rather than requiring athletes to travel to a lab. “The model allows us to explore the range of opportunities we could try to commercialise,” Wallis says. For a university sports science department already ranked in the world’s top ten, that flexibility may prove to be fuelsync’s real competitive edge.