Key Notes
- Michael Polansky, Lady Gaga's fiancé and a former Sean Parker deputy, co-founded Outer Biosciences (formerly stealth since 2022), which sources donor skin discarded after surgery and keeps it living outside the body for over a month via a proprietary support system, far beyond the industry norm of just days.
- The company runs a closed AI loop called YUNA: a model predicts which untested compounds might affect specific skin functions, researchers test predictions on the living tissue, and results feed back to improve the next round.
- The company targets cosmetic ingredients, has raised about $23 million from investors including Wing Ventures and Initialized, employs 19 people, and Gaga sits on its board.
Michael Polansky, the co-founder and chief executive of biotech startup Outer Biosciences and fiancé of Lady Gaga, has spent years quietly building a system that keeps living human skin tissue alive outside the body for over a month, well beyond the industry norm of just a few days.
The company, founded in 2022, sources skin that would otherwise be discarded after surgery, mostly plastic surgery, through what it describes as vetted biobanks and brokers operating under institutional review board oversight and documented donor consent. Every sample arrives already de-identified before Outer Biosciences receives it. A proprietary support system feeds the tissue nutrients and removes metabolic waste, extending its viable life roughly tenfold beyond typical lab conditions.
That extra time matters because many skin processes, such as collagen remodeling, pigmentation change and barrier repair, unfold over weeks rather than days, too slowly for tissue that dies within 48 to 72 hours to reveal. Researchers can, for example, induce UVB sunburn damage in living tissue and then track the stress, inflammation and recovery response over subsequent weeks as an information-gathering exercise, rather than attempting to heal the tissue itself.
The tissue platform feeds a closed AI loop the company calls YUNA. A model predicts which untested chemicals are likely to affect a specific skin function, researchers test those predictions on the living tissue, and the results, whether the prediction proved right or wrong, are fed back into the model to sharpen its next round of guesses. Polansky describes that loop, not any single ingredient, as the company’s actual product.
The acceleration has been substantial. Before AI was layered into the process, an earlier “brute force” approach mining scientific literature produced only a couple of promising leads over about 18 months. With the AI loop running, Outer Biosciences now generates a new candidate roughly every six weeks, with six leads currently active and, according to Polansky, four of those likely to reach commercialization.
Outer Biosciences is developing cosmetic ingredients rather than drugs, so the ingredients require standardized industry naming and safety testing under international guidelines rather than FDA approval. Instead of building its own consumer brand, the company plans to license or sell finished ingredients to beauty or pharmaceutical companies that would formulate and market them. In the meantime, it generates revenue through research partnerships, including one with a pharmaceutical company studying why certain cancer drugs cause skin rashes.
The company has raised roughly $23 million to date from investors including Wing Ventures, Initialized Capital and Polansky’s own investment firm, Hawktail. It employs 19 people, based mostly near Cambridge, Massachusetts. Germanotta sits on Outer Biosciences’ board, and the two companies collaborate at the margins; Outer Biosciences’ chief scientist also advises Germanotta’s cosmetics brand, Haus Labs.
Why This Approach Is Distinctive
Outer Biosciences’ core wager is that better training data, not a bigger model, is the bottleneck in skin science. Unlike language models trained on scraped internet text, there is no existing “biology internet” for skin-active compounds to draw from, so the company generates its own proprietary dataset from scratch through physical experiments on living tissue, a slower and more capital-intensive approach than typical software AI startups, but one Polansky argues is more defensible precisely because the underlying data cannot simply be scraped or replicated. He notes the universe of currently approved skin-active ingredients is small, with roughly 120 to 130 FDA-recognized over-the-counter active ingredients and closer to 200 once research-backed cosmetic ingredients are included, leaving substantial room for new discoveries.
The approach also stays deliberately modest in scale. All of the company’s AI work runs on local servers rather than the cloud, in part because Polansky says the company does not want its tissue and experimental data leaving its own infrastructure, and its compute demands are far lower than those of a large language model. Outer Biosciences is not alone in this space; Philadelphia-based Vivodyne is pursuing a similar goal using lab-grown organ tissue rather than donated human skin, and has raised close to $80 million to date, while other competitors are building organ-on-a-chip systems for preclinical testing.
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