AI Learns on Living Skin: The Secret Biostartup of Lady Gaga's Partner

Michael Polansky is better known to the broader public as the creative, business and romantic partner of Stefani Germanotta — Lady Gaga. Yet alongside his life in the world of show business, since 2022 he has headed the startup Outer Biosciences, which until recently he barely mentioned even to close friends. Now the company has decided to “work in the open.”

Skin That Lives Outside the Body

The idea grew out of a long-standing frustration: biology and chemistry advance far more slowly than software, because running experiments directly on people is unethical, while the usual stand-ins — animal models, simplified cell cultures, organoids — poorly reflect how a real organ behaves.

Outer Biosciences took a different route. The company obtains human skin that would otherwise be discarded after surgeries (mostly plastic ones), through vetted biobanks operating under the oversight of ethics committees and with documented donor consent. All samples arrive de-identified. A proprietary life-support system feeds the tissue nutrients and removes metabolic waste, extending its life to as long as a month — whereas the usual span is measured in days. According to Polansky, 30-day tissue is in many ways similar to the original, though not entirely identical to it.

This reprieve makes it possible to observe slow processes: the remodeling of collagen, shifts in pigmentation, the repair of the barrier. Researchers, for example, induce an ultraviolet burn in the living skin and spend weeks tracking inflammation and repair responses — not “treating” it, but simply watching biology run its course.

A Closed Loop with AI

All of this is built into a self-learning system. An AI model predicts which untested substances might beneficially affect a specific skin function; the candidates are run through the living tissue; the results — whether the prediction was right or not — feed back into the model, improving the next round of guesses.

The progress is impressive. Earlier the company operated by “brute force,” combing through the scientific literature, and over a year and a half it turned up a couple of leads. With AI, a new candidate appears roughly every six weeks; six promising directions are in the works, along with several dozen additional “hits.”

The goal is intriguing too. This is not about drugs but about cosmetic ingredients, so FDA approval is not required. And the entire current “arsenal” of active components is extremely modest: about 120–130 approved over-the-counter actives, and, counting the researched cosmetic ones, around 200. The room for discovery is enormous.

Its Own Niche

Outer Biosciences is not building its own brand; instead it plans to license or sell finished ingredients to cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies; four of the six current directions will likely make it to market. For now the money comes from research partnerships.

The company has raised about $23 million and keeps a staff of 19 outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. The data it gathers exists nowhere else — a kind of protection, since there is no “internet of biology” to train AI on. Tellingly, all of the AI's work runs locally rather than in the cloud: “We don't want the data to be in the cloud,” Polansky says.

Source: TechCrunch