ON ON0 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2014 TORONTO STAR⎮IN3

>>TEN TO WATCH IN 2015

Good things come in threes, they say,and for young Toronto entrepreneurJordan Whelan, that means three robustand diverse companies.

Call him a triple threat at 28 years ofage, or simply call him fearless, creativeand driven. And “restless,” he says.

“If you don’t work incessantly to makeyour own way, you’ll end up working in ajob picking up the leftover scraps ofsomeone else’s dream.”

Whelan’s newest company, Framestr, ispoised to shake up the social e-com-merce industry, his cardboard marketingfirm Our Paper Life will have its prod-ucts prominently displayed at the 2015Pan Am/Parapan Am Games, and his

public relations firm Grey Smoke Mediahas attracted major legal and politicalclients, including the John Tory forMayor campaign.

“To me, Jordan represents the millen-nial entrepreneur, the idea that beinggood at just one thing doesn’t cut it,” saysBritt Aharoni, a radio producer at New-stalk 1010, where Whelan worked as aproducer before starting his businesscareer. “It’s about being great at many.”

Framestr acts as a conduit for word-of-mouth product recommendations be-tween friends. Users can share any prod-uct on the site via a unique link throughsocial media or email. If friends make apurchase, the original user receives acash commission from the business,usually between 5 per cent and 15 per

cent of the object’s value.Since launching in August, Framestr

has posted more than 20,000 productsfrom nearly 300 businesses — includingcamera-maker GoPro — spanning 18countries. The site has doubled in sign-ups every month.

“The only way a small business cancompete with a large corporation andmassive ad budgets is the invaluablepower of word of mouth,” says the Ham-ilton-born Whelan, naming Sara Blake-ly’s Spanx as one such business thatbecame a billion-dollar household namethrough the power of talk.

With his sights on business, Whelanbroke from the family tradition of work-ing in health care — his father is a urol-ogist, his mother a family doctor, hisyounger sister studies public health andhis older sister is a former nurse nowexploring entrepreneurship. He earned abachelor of commerce degree fromMcMaster University.

After school he worked for five years inthe media — with host Mike Bullard atNewstalk 1010, in digital production atMuchMusic and Virgin Radio, at SunMedia, with a humour column called“Try Guy,” and at the Huffington Post,where he currently blogs.

His first breakthrough company wasOur Paper Life (OPL), a marketing de-sign firm that uses 100-per-cent localand recycled materials to create custom-branded cardboard items such as chairs,desks and umbrellas.

For the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan AmGames, OPL has developed products to

be used in the athletes’ village and sport-ing facilities. Some of the items will befunctional, takeaway keepsakes, such asa small recycling bin. OPL will havepop-up displays at various outdoor festi-vals this summer. A past highlight wasOPL’s cardboard “beach” with reclinersand umbrellas in David Pecaut Squarefor June’s Luminato festival.

“Furniture is so ubiquitous,” says Whe-lan. “We want to offer it as a brandablecommunication tool for all businesses.”

The young entrepreneur’s third com-pany, Grey Smoke Media, has attractedmajor legal and political clients, in-cluding Tory’s campaign and Diamondand Diamond Personal Injury Lawyers.

Whelan rolls out unique concepts usinghis “parketing” (PR and marketing)model, collaborating with search-en-gine-optimization experts. “We’ll get aclient a media hit in a major news outletand then also parlay that into gettingthem on page one of Google.”

Whelan says he’s content to have hissocial life on semi-permanent hold andhas “stopped counting the days beforethe weekend.

“There are so many baby steps, coffees,favours and unpaid initiatives I took inorder . . . to reach this point. When youhave an innovation, it’s very difficult toshow your value properly to your cus-tomers — it’s challenging to be the first,and definitely no one wants to be thelast.

“In business you always have to operateas if someone is breathing down yourneck. Always have a sense of urgency.”

> JORDAN WHELAN

Jordan Whelan has launched three companies in the past year, including Our Paper Life, which creates cardboard furniture to be used for marketing purposes. Clients include the Pan Ams.RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR

Fearless youngentrepreneura triple threatBiz wunderkind rides a ‘sense of urgency’as he devises marketing and other productsJENNIFER BILLTORONTO STAR

“In business youalways have tooperate as ifsomeone isbreathing downyour neck.”JORDAN WHELAN

Dr. Lili-Naz Hazrati is a neuropathol-ogist, a medical specialty that involvesexamining and diagnosing dead anddiseased brain tissue.

And she joined the field mainly for theaccess it would grant her to this gorystuff.

Because even with recent and prodi-gious advances in head-scanning tech-nologies, many ailments of this cardinalorgan can be diagnosed only after death.

And the hundreds of dead brains she’sexamined over more than a decade havegiven Hazrati fresh and promising ideasabout some of today’s most pressingneurological ailments.

“Most neurological diseases . . . theygive them a diagnosis during life, but theultimate final diagnosis is really based onthe autopsy still,” says Hazrati, an assis-tant professor in laboratory medicine atthe University of Toronto.

“And in order to understand thesediseases we don’t understand, we have toclassify them properly.”

For example, the proper classificationof various forms of dementia — whichcan be hard to tell apart on the basis ofpeople’s symptoms when they’re alive —can only be based on the hallmark differ-

ences found in their brains after death.Hazrati’s work has increasingly focused

on dementias caused by Alzheimer’sdisease and athletic concussions, two ofthe most worrisome ailments of ourtimes.

And groups of patients who suffer fromthese conditions — or their families —have agreed to donate their brains to hermedical research.

Dozens of times a year, a pager shefaithfully carries will go off, alerting herto the fact one of these patients has died.

And Hazrati, a horror movie aficionado,will either rush off herself or arrange fora colleague to retrieve the brain and sendit to her lab.

“The autopsy will then allow me toclassify (the diseases) properly,” saysHazrati, who works out of the UniversityHealth Network’s Toronto General site.

It was during her classifications ofAlzheimer’s victims and concussion-based chronic traumatic encephalopa-thy (CTE) patients — the latter mostlyformer athletes — that Hazrati noticedsomething striking.

While she found that the brains ofolder CTE patients closely resembledthose of Alzheimer’s victims, the brainsof younger concussed athletes did not.

What these younger athletes did havewas widespread damage and destructionof the brain’s glia cells, which surroundand help protect the working neuronsthat allow for movement, emotion andthought.

As a result, Hazrati theorized that theprogression to the advanced forms ofboth diseases might follow similarroutes and — more important — have acommon cause in these supporting gliacells.

And, as it turns out, she found that thesame glia cell receptors that were acti-vated by injury and inflammation inconcussed human brains could be trig-gered to kick off the degenerative pro-cess in mice models of Alzheimer’s dis-ease.

Thus, Hazrati says, the telltale signs ofAlzheimer’s disease — the so-calledplaques and tangles that stuff the with-ered neuron cells of its victims — maynot be a cause but an end product ofchanges that originate in surroundingglia cells.

And the triggering receptors within

these supporting cells may prove anexciting target for new drug develop-ment and a potential source of biomark-ers for early diagnosis and risk-levelassessments for both conditions.

A mother of two girls, 11and 13, Haz-rati’s interest in the brain dates back to asummer job she happened upon at Que-bec City’s Laval University when she wasa teenager.

“I was just starting biology and I heardfrom somebody else in the cafeteria thatthere was this job in a lab for the sum-mer,” the Iranian native says.

“I was in this dark room for the wholesummer projecting these slides of (thebrain structures called) basal ganglia onthe wall.

"You become emotionally attached tothis work. It became my world, basical-ly.”

Indeed, by the time Hazrati completedher undergrad science degree, she’dalready done enough brain researchduring summer stints at the brain lab towrite a quick master’s thesis.

She went on to gain a PhD in neurosci-ence and did several post-doctoral fel-lowships before attending medicalschool at the University of Montreal.

Hazrati hopes that 2015 will allow herto solidify her work on the Alzheimer’s-concussion connection.

“We really need to go forward and tospend a good year of concentrated re-search comparing all these hypothesesand doing more experiments on this.”

> LILI-NAZ HAZRATI

Unlocking the secrets of diseased brains

Dr. Lili-NazHazrati is aneurologicalpathologiststudyingAlzheimer’s andthe effects ofconcussions,among otherbrain-relatedissues.

RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR

Neuropathologist has foundintriguing links betweenAlzheimer’s and concussions

JOSEPH HALL FEATURE WRITER