Preserving the biological moments people can't go back and collect.
A real near-term business. A long-term platform underneath it.
The long-term North Star hasn't changed: build the biological measurement system for human recovery, a proprietary, longitudinal understanding of how biology behaves at rest, under stress, and through recovery from a meaningful event. What's changed is sequencing and structure. Rather than requiring years of unfunded R&D before any revenue exists, and rather than requiring a customer to commit to full custody before they have a concrete reason to need it, we've structured the company around two connected horizons and a decoupled product.
EVENT: a biobank business
One physical kit, sold on its own, that preserves a biological specimen in professional custody only once someone actually activates it, either as a healthy-state Reference or following a real health event. Revenue independent of unsolved science.
The discovery platform
As the archive grows, consented specimens become the substrate for the biomarker discovery, modeling, and eventual validated tools that are the real long-term venture-scale opportunity.
Where we are today: EVENT is live for real purchase on our public site. The EVENT Collection Kit is a $49.99 one-time purchase that does not start any recurring charge; a kit can sit unused indefinitely. Professional Specimen Custody is offered as a separate, secondary purchase at $120/year, per preserved collection, intended for someone who has already used a kit and is ready to preserve what they collected. No specimens have been analyzed; none will be until a customer or a future rights-holder specifically requests it.
Product architecture note: the model previously shipped as a single baseline-only collection, priced as a bundled kit-plus-custody purchase. We reopened that decision this session for two structural reasons. First, bundling custody into the purchase price meant asking a customer to pay for a multi-year commitment before they had any concrete reason to need it, real friction with no real forcing function behind it, since this business doesn't have cord blood banking's forced decision moment (birth). Second, baseline-only left out the audience with the clearest, most immediate reason to buy: someone who has just experienced a real health event and has an urgent, present reason to preserve their biology now. The current model addresses both: one kit, purchased with no attached recurring cost, that supports either Reference or Event collection at the moment of activation, with custody billed separately and only once a collection is actually preserved. This is a real, deliberate reversal from the baseline-only direction, not a return to something tried and set aside.
Background
Darren Burke, PhD, spent the first half of his career as a university professor, researching human performance, metabolism, and nutrition. That research led him into entrepreneurship: he founded and scaled Rivalus, a bootstrapped sports nutrition brand, to category leader followed by a successful exit. Most recently, he co-founded Headstrong Labs, a brain health and performance company. He also mentors early-stage founders building science-driven companies. EVENT is where these threads meet, applying a research career and two ventures in applied human performance toward building the biological measurement system for human recovery.
The case for preserving a biological moment before it's gone
Sport-related concussion is one concrete, well-documented example of why this matters, not the only one. The Concussion in Sport Group's most recent international consensus (Amsterdam, 2022, built from ten systematic reviews) acknowledges that concussion does not reliably show up on standard structural imaging, and revised earlier guidance suggesting recovery typically occurs in seven to ten days, calling that assumption probably overly optimistic. Separately, a 2023 study of 631 former football players found the strongest predictor of chronic traumatic encephalopathy was cumulative head impact exposure over a career, not the number of diagnosed concussions, meaning the risk that matters most long-term isn't fully captured by tracking injury events alone.
The same underlying problem shows up well beyond concussion, in stroke, accident and trauma, acute illness, and other meaningful health events: by the time anyone wants to understand what changed, there's rarely a "before" to compare against, and the exact biological state around the event itself can never be recollected once it has passed. EVENT exists to make sure that before exists, whether it's established proactively or captured in the moment something happens.
One kit, two uses, decided at activation
A single, standardized EVENT Collection Kit ships to every customer for $49.99, one-time. Buying a kit does not start any custody fee or recurring charge; a kit can sit unused indefinitely until someone chooses to use it. The same kit supports two uses, selected at the time of activation rather than at the time of purchase:
Collected while healthy
Establishes an earlier biological point in time, before anything has happened, so a future comparison is possible.
Collected following a meaningful event
Concussion or head impact, stroke or suspected neurological event, accident or trauma, acute illness, new symptoms, diagnosis, or major medical procedure. These are examples of collection triggers, not diagnostic claims.
Collection is standardized regardless of which use is selected: a single at-home saliva collection, following exact instructions (including standardized collection timing, given known confounds like cortisol's diurnal rhythm), shipped back for verification, accessioning, and long-term, professionally managed custody once that specific collection is activated and paid for.
Specimen architecture note: the previously "locked" two-vial chemistry design (a combined DNA/RNA tube plus a separate protein/hormone tube) is intentionally reopened, not finalized. Supporting Event collections at unpredictable times following diverse health events raises the bar on preservation validation rather than lowering it, and we are not willing to lock a final vessel count, chemistry, or shipping stability profile ahead of that work. Saliva remains the preferred initial specimen type, scalable and collectible outside a clinical environment, but the company should not be understood as permanently, structurally saliva-only.
An FDA-Registered, Accredited-Standard Facility
We are planning to work with a professional biorepository partner for long-term specimen custody. This relationship is not yet contracted, and we are not naming the partner, even on this gated page, until an agreement is executed; public-facing site copy refers only to a "planned biorepository partner."
Per the partner's own current materials, the facility maintains ISO 20387:2018 biobanking accreditation, CAP Biorepository Accreditation, ISO 9001:2015 certification, and FDA registration, and reports passing an unannounced FDA inspection with zero Form 483 observations. Note on language discipline we're holding ourselves to internally: the correct term is "FDA registered," never "FDA certified" or "FDA compliant" used loosely to imply approval; none of these credentials belong to EVENT or Event Biologic Inc., they belong to the biorepository partner; any public claim will always be attributed accordingly (e.g., "stored at an ISO 20387-accredited biorepository," never "EVENT is ISO 20387 accredited").
A purpose-built biorepository and GMP warehouse. Validated environments from ambient through liquid nitrogen; final storage temperature depends on our validated collection SOP, not yet finalized given the reopened specimen architecture above.
24/7 environmental monitoring, readings every 5 minutes, automated alerts, ±0.5°C probe accuracy, annual NIST-traceable calibration.
UPS plus dual diesel generator backup, formal business continuity planning, annual disaster-recovery testing.
Keycard access, photo ID, visitor escort and ID verification, extensive camera coverage, 24/7 surveillance, third-party burglary monitoring.
LIMS-based chain of custody: accessioning, unique identifiers, barcode/vial-level tracking, permanent inventory records, annual audits.
Operations stated as HIPAA-aligned; LIMS supports HIPAA/GDPR requirements; daily backup, annual pentest. Note: this does not make EVENT or Event Biologic Inc. itself HIPAA/GDPR compliant, we are separately building our own privacy architecture.
Customer-facing specimen journey, aligned to this workflow: Collect → Return → Verify → Accession → Preserve → Track/Store. Retrieval is available subject to the customer's authorization; destruction follows a documented, independently-verified process performed by a qualified vendor.
Decoupled pricing. A separate, honest question.
Custody scales with the number of preserved collections a customer maintains, not a flat per-customer subscription. A customer with a Reference and a later Event, both still in custody, generates 2 × $120/year, not a single fee. This is a materially different, and more scalable, revenue structure than a bundled purchase, and it removes the friction of asking someone to commit to custody before they've had any concrete reason to need it.
We deliberately do not describe the annual custody fee as "storage." Raw freezer space is inexpensive; the fee reflects preservation, identity, traceability, security, monitoring, redundancy, chain of custody, and retrievability, the professional custody infrastructure above, not the physical cost of cold. The $120/year figure is currently a hypothesis, communicated as "$120/year per preserved collection," not yet validated against full activation-triggered cost modeling (return logistics, accessioning, processing, LIMS entry, biorepository intake, first-year storage, support, and payment processing).
Every customer pays the same price regardless of research-participation consent. Customers may designate a specimen Private, or opt into named Contribute categories: Internal Research, Partner Research (licensed to vetted third parties under contractual protection, no re-identification), and Players' Association Advocacy Reporting (aggregate only, never individual-level, where applicable). Broad, undefined "consent to any future use" was deliberately rejected in favor of these named categories, a well-documented biobank-ethics failure pattern (Henrietta Lacks, the Havasupai Tribe) that sophisticated investor diligence also reads as a liability, not an asset.
Four audiences, tested rather than assumed
EVENT is not built as an athlete-only product. We are deliberately testing four initial DTC audiences in parallel, not ranking them in advance:
Value preserving biological optionality for future health questions, independent of any specific injury risk.
Elevated exposure to injury and head-impact events; already understand the baseline concept from prior positioning.
Want kits available for children, and/or want to establish a healthy Reference for them ahead of time.
Newly identified as a particularly important acquisition audience: an actual event creates immediate urgency and a clear, present reason to preserve a specimen, a real forcing function the baseline-only model previously lacked.
Future distribution to physicians, clinics, sports organizations, and athletic trainers is a real possibility once there's evidence supporting it. DTC remains the near-term focus for rapid product-market-fit testing across all four audiences.
What the archive becomes
Every Contribute-consented specimen deepens the same underlying, longitudinal, standardized archive, potentially including Reference, Event, and future Event collections from the same individual over time, a class of prospective biological material that could not have been recruited retrospectively. As it grows, it becomes the substrate for the discovery and validation work that represents the real long-term opportunity: biomarker discovery, kinetic and time-aware recovery modeling, and eventually, where scientifically justified, validated clinical tools. We are deliberately not promising a timeline or a specific discovery, and Horizon 1 is built to work on its own without Horizon 2 ever materializing.
Layered defensibility as this matures: a proprietary longitudinal specimen and metadata archive; biomarker and kinetic IP as patterns are discovered; algorithm and modeling IP; eventual clinical validation and, if pursued, regulatory authorization. The freezer itself is not the moat, the standardized, consented, re-contactable archive built on top of it is.
A proven structural analog, and a real research landscape
EVENT's business model is not a novel bet. Cord blood banking is a genuine, multi-decade, profitable industry built on the same logic: a one-time collection fee plus an ongoing custody fee, a customer paying for optionality rather than a guaranteed clinical outcome. Cord blood banks typically charge more upfront than EVENT's current kit pricing ($1,000–3,000 is common), suggesting real room to price higher later. Our planned biorepository partner's real infrastructure and accreditation gives us a credible answer to the trust question cord blood banks also lean on heavily.
At the eventual discovery and diagnostic layer, we are not assuming an empty field. Saliva-based concussion biology specifically is an active, credible category; a CE-marked, published, peer-reviewed salivary concussion diagnostic already exists in elite rugby, and a commercial saliva diagnostics company holds issued U.S. patent protection in this space. That validates the underlying science category and means our eventual discovery work needs to be genuinely differentiated, which is precisely why we're building the archive first rather than racing to a diagnostic claim before the data exists to support one.
Who we're building this with
We do not yet have a formal advisory board in place. We are actively building relationships across five categories:
Team physicians, athletic trainers, and neurotrauma specialists, to keep the science grounded in real clinical practice.
Exercise physiologists, biomarker scientists, and biostatisticians, to guide protocol design and validation.
People who've built lab operations, bioinformatics, or health data infrastructure at scale.
Investors and operators with real experience in biotech, healthtech, or venture-backed life sciences.
People who understand how to sell into and operate within professional sports organizations and health systems.
- Patricios JS, Schneider KJ, Dvorak J, et al. Consensus statement on concussion in sport: the 6th International Conference on Concussion in Sport—Amsterdam, October 2022. Br J Sports Med. 2023;57:695-711.
- McKee AC, Stein TD, Huber BR, et al. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE): criteria for neuropathological diagnosis and relationship to repetitive head impacts. Acta Neuropathol. 2023;145(4):371-394.
- Daneshvar DH, Nair ES, Baucom ZH, et al. Leveraging football accelerometer data to quantify associations between repetitive head impacts and chronic traumatic encephalopathy in males. Nat Commun. 2023;14:3470.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About Repeated Head Impacts. Traumatic Brain Injury & Concussion. cdc.gov.
Let's talk.
If you'd like to learn more or discuss how you might be involved, we'd welcome the conversation.
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