When Dr. Gary Rodziewicz came to Patrick Prioletti G ’21 with a proposition, he was immediately intrigued. Dr. Rodziewicz, a neurosurgeon who now works for a private practice specializing in medical cannabis, explained that many of his patients and friends complained that their pain management treatments were not working. He told Patrick, who has always been fascinated by neuroscience, that such treatments are related to receptors in the brain, which are unique to every individual and thus react differently to dosages.

The doctor noted that the first prescribed dosage of medical cannabis is typically only 20-30% effective but that this effectiveness jumps drastically to over 80% after a follow-up assessment and just one dosage adjustment. He hoped to develop an app that would allow patients to report feedback and receive automatic dosage adjustments to streamline the treatment process.

This is where Patrick comes in.

Patrick Prioletti, who is pursuing a Master’s degree in Applied Science at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, has worked for Blackstone LaunchPad and Techstars as both a Global Media Fellow and Rubin Family Innovation Mentor.

“I’m pretty good at thinking about a problem and how to scale it digitally.”

His commitment to innovation has led him to now pursue an endeavor in tandem with Dr. Rodziewicz, Dennis Taussig and William Kimball. He is serving as interim CTO and learning systems architect for Your Perfect Dose, an outlet for Patrick to apply his relentless curiosity, abstract thinking and tech abilities to a venture that will transform the way medical cannabis treatments are implemented.

“Pharmaceutical companies won’t be happy when they learn an algorithm can do what doctors can.”

However, the aim of Your Perfect Dose is not to replace doctors but to make custom dosage adjustments more accessible to patients. The app will be based on user feedback — daily or weekly — where patients can quickly rate their pain, log improvements in sleep, report side effects, and more. The goal is to make the process as simple as possible so that even a working mother can input her symptoms between making breakfast and driving her children to school.

The app will offer a suite for doctors to view their patients’ feedback so they can still offer further suggestions. Rather than waiting for months to schedule a follow-up appointment, patients can check in daily for automatic dosage shifts, freeing up doctors’ time to focus on new patients who need more detailed evaluations and automate the patients who have already found their necessary dose.

Otherwise, Your Perfect Dose can also serve as a safer way for self-medicating users — who will continue to medicate regardless of if this app exists — to determine more accurate dosages for their needs.

By capturing a wealth of nuanced data in such a simple way, the app also offers limitless potential for further research.

Currently, the app is being tested on only two users to determine if the program works, but the next step will be to roll out the beta under close monitoring by doctors to patients in Dr. Rodziewicz’s practice to collect an initial foundation of data from which the app will create suggestions. Your Perfect Dose will then continue to improve its algorithm through a machine learning structure that will process patients’ feedback based on its dosage adjustments.

In the future, Patrick and his team hope that the app can be deployed for other medical drugs or treatments.

“If this can work for cannabis, it can work for anything,” he says.

Patrick says his team seeks critique: “If we can hear that something is a bad idea, that’s good because at least then we have direction.”

Yet recently, they have been receiving mostly positive responses, and Your Perfect Dose even started getting noticed by members of the medical tech breakthrough community.

The director of the biotech accelerator at Syracuse told Patrick, “You’re going to shake a lot of cages.” The team will face a lot of initial resistance from the medical community, but that’s exactly how change works.

That said, at a recent business competition pitch, Patrick faced a question that left him taken aback: “If you’re helping people self-medicate with marijuana, aren’t you adding to the problem?”

In this moment, Patrick realized that although medical marijuana has already been proven to work — and act as a much safer alternative to opioids, which can be dangerously addicting — there are still many people that don’t agree.

“We’re living in the future,” he says. “But there’s still a lot of people out there that aren’t going to be on board with this.” This opened his eyes to the fact that they will still need to fight on the regulatory stage more so than in the user engagement sphere.

Patrick adds, “This will exist whether we build it or someone else does.”

The app is groundbreaking not only because of its algorithmic approach to treatment but also because its accessibility will save billions of dollars in medical expenses — especially for populations who may not normally be able to afford doctors. It is a platform where ordinary people can self-assess with guidance from scientific findings and service those who wouldn’t otherwise be serviced at all.

Patrick encourages other entrepreneurs to shut out opinionated voices and focus on testing their ideas.

“If you’re listening to everyone, then you’re not listening to anything.”

Fortunately, Patrick can engage in hypothesis testing for his projects and isolate himself from the expectations of others.

“You can’t put a box around me,” he states.

Patrick also speaks to the nature of innovation: “You will never hear about true innovation until one day it slaps you in the face when you wake up.”

Perhaps someday, when Your Perfect Dose is at the core of the way we do medical treatment, this slap is exactly what we’ll feel.

To learn more about Patrick, view his LinkedIn. To sign up as a test user for Your Perfect Dose, check out ypdme.com.

Story by Sasha Temerte ’23, LaunchPad Orange Ambassador; photo supplied

Raul leans his back against the wall of the building behind him. He kicks one foot over another, positioning a notebook on his lap and beginning to jot down ideas for his next script. As he observes each passerby that strolls past him, he can’t help but wonder what their lives are like.

Raul Hernandez Guardans, an acting major at the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, is the founder of Sonder Films — a film production company based in Spain.

Sonder is defined as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” To Raul, this means bringing to life the stories of typically mispresented or stereotyped individuals.

Before college, Raul realized he felt trapped in his hometown in Barcelona. He decided to drop everything to move to London with no financial assistance from his family. Through working odd jobs, his eyes opened to the fact that so many lifestyles are neglected in traditional film.

“Let’s tell the stories of those passerby’s,” he says.

Raul explains that in Spain, there is much less funding and resources for small artists, and therefore, significantly fewer independent films. As such, there is also less freedom to better portray people or lifestyles who have been stigmatized or ill-represented, such as sex workers or those with mental illnesses.

Raul appreciates all that makes people interesting, such as fashion and aesthetics, both of which allow for personal expression. He values the ability to express unique perspectives and appreciates diversity in thought.

Through directing his own films, Raul can achieve creative control over the story he is telling (as compared to acting, where he would be at the mercy of other visions).

To kickstart Sonder Films, Raul is working to produce his first 90-minute feature film: Azul de Niño. The film will tell a story of a married woman who discovers her husband is having an affair with a male prostitute and wants to meet the lover to get answers. However, her plans are interrupted when she gets a heart-stopping call from the hospital — her husband had a stroke and is lying unconscious. The wife and the lover — who fell in love with the husband — both rush to the hospital, and the remainder of the film highlights the dynamic of the two grappling with their situation as they both wait for the husband to recover in the ICU.

At the center of it all is Raul, who is helping in producing and directing the film, serving as an actor, and writing the entire script.

“I’m everything,” he says with a chuckle.

And on top of that, he is also the businessman behind the brand.

Raul has fought to raise 40,000 euros thus far from personal investors and is looking to business competition pitches — such as those led by Blackstone LaunchPad & Techstars — or crowdfunding to raise the remaining 15,000 euros he still needs.

In Spain, it is currently difficult to turn to the government or production companies for these funds, especially in light of COVID-19, which has crippled the economy and available funds for independent artists.

“Our whole team is working out of faith,” he says gratefully. He plans to reimburse the actors and collaborators of the film as soon as they have the remaining funds or turn a profit after the film’s release. 

Raul speaks to the importance of such a reliable team: “You need to have a team around you that you trust enough to delegate your vision and your business.”

He adds that although he’s working across many sectors of the production, this delegation is important.

“You can’t actually take everything on,” he notes. Raul also explains that a team grows stronger when granted artistic power.

In selecting his team, Raul looks for pragmatism, common vision and flexibility.

“You need to be able to adapt because this is such a fluid process,” he says. “And you need to have spunk too.”

Raul values his own development of this “spunk.” He states that entrepreneurship is born out of self-confidence — something he didn’t always have. When he was younger, he didn’t want this kind of responsibility, but over time, he grew to understand his own artistic vision and shut off negative inner voices. It was during his time in London that he felt empowered to regain a voice.

As an artist and filmmaker, Raul derives his ideas from other art and people that inspire him. He encourages others to engage in random interactions, whether that is on the subway or just waiting in line.

“You’ll find fascinating people everywhere,” he says. It is these fascinating people and the ideas they evoke that push him to contemplate the nature of different livelihoods.

“The arts are our channel to empathy, understanding and dialogue.” He hopes that Sonder Films will help reduce the division that stems from political biases and that his film will open peoples’ eyes to experiences unlike their own.

After graduating this upcoming spring, Raul is expecting that he will complete shooting over the summer.

Throughout the process, Raul has learned to pursue his passion earnestly: “Release the stakes and pressure,” he says. “Do what you do because you love it.”

To learn more about Sonder Films or contact Raul, reach out to raul@sonderfilms.es.

Story by Sasha Temerte ’23, LaunchPad Orange Ambassador; photo supplied

“People are hungry for more,” says Ryan Ondocin, peering over his computer. “And people will respond to this.” On his screen lies the beta design for Satellite, a unique social media platform that allows users to connect like never before.

Unlike most social media platforms, such as Instagram or Facebook, whose models are based on keeping users on the apps for prolonged periods of time by leveraging follower counts and addicting content, Satellite offers a different approach.

“We maximize quality of user engagement, not quantity,” Ryan says.

Satellite encourages users to create smaller circles of friends with which they can share weekly updates with writing and photos, similar to a newsletter. This limit forces people to engage in reflective introspection rather than blindly posting meaningless updates, thus allowing users to maintain their relationships in a more genuine way.

“We spend hours of screen time on social media each week. What if we can use that time in the most productive way possible?”

He emphasizes that Satellite also differs from apps like GroupMe, where conversations are moved by day-to-day news like sports, sometimes leaving disinterested members detached and out of the loop. He says that whereas group messaging functions like an open mic, Satellite will act as an emcee by passing the mic from person to person.

“Satellite harnesses the power of oration – friends are great storytellers.” And it is stories that build meaningful interactions.

He explains that at their most fundamental level, humans crave connection. Yet it seems that current social media only breeds division, between the rapid spread of misinformation and the lack of regulation of people’s data and privacy.

“I don’t care if you have 50,000 friends on Facebook. If you have 5 real friends, that’s what matters,” Ryan notes.

Ryan is studying for a Master’s in Applied Data Science at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. Until now, Ryan had been mainly interested in applications of data science and machine learning to medicine. He had previously worked with PlantVillage, a research lab recognized by Google AI that helps farmers diagnose plant diseases. He also currently works with WiTech which is collaborating with the Department of Defense to model and implement early detection strategies for COVID-19 — a position that will soon place him in Maui. 

Ryan’s tenacity and equanimity allow him to stick with a problem as he stumbles through the dark until uncovering a lightbulb moment — approaches he often employs in projects such as these.

He was introduced to Satellite by a friend of Nick Barba ‘20, the LaunchPad’s independent project manager and a long-time LaunchPad Global Fellow.  Barba is the team co-founder. For the first six months, Ryan adopted a devil’s advocate approach to balance out Nick’s optimism and flesh out the kinks in his plan.  This month, he led the team’s pitch at ‘Cuse Tank 2020, sponsored by the LaunchPad.

Over time, the project pushed him to reframe his perspective of social media, identifying all that is wrong and noticing his own susceptibility to the Pavlovian effect of social media. Now, he views this project as an opportunity to fine-tune his skills in a consulting or management position — something he hopes to pursue following graduation.

As Ryan reflects on the building of the Satellite team, he describes the importance of understanding team dynamics and bringing various entities together to achieve a goal. He also explains that a team can only build something worthwhile if the members are passionate about their projects.

“I want to be a competent leader,” he says. In doing so, Ryan stresses the importance of humility and brutal honesty with yourself. “If you don’t know the answer, you can’t be afraid to ask questions.”

This powerful dynamic makes their global team function like a well-oiled machine, even with interns spanning from the coast of California to the country of Ghana.

Ryan speaks to the empowerment of their team: “These interns are driving the rocket with us.”

In developing their product, the team needs to grapple with their growth and revenue model to avoid falling into the same pitfalls of hierarchy that other platforms have. Nevertheless, they are not concerned about competing with companies like Facebook.

“You measure success not by comparing yourself to others but to who you were yesterday.”

Hence, as they think to expand to subscription-based upgrades that offer classroom discussion boards or larger circles of friends, they ensure that they are keeping their original mission at the forefront of development.

“We are holding ourselves accountable. There is no discrepancy between our interests and our users’ interests.”

Looking forward, Ryan predicts that the world will enter a “design renaissance,” where social media platforms will have to revert their design to adhere to its original purpose as a tool, rather than an enabler that encourages people to create virtual facades.

“I want to create something much bigger than myself,” Ryan says. “The legacy I want to leave behind should be evident in what I document and create.”

He is uncertain what his future has in store for him, but he is confident in Satellite and in his own passion for whichever path he pursues.

“We’re fresh out of the water and nervous but young enough to make it happen.”

Visit Satellite’s website to sign up for the pre-release beta and read more about Ryan’s projects on his LinkedIn resume.

Story by Sasha Temerte ’23, LaunchPad Orange Ambassador; photo supplied