Michael Polansky, better known as Lady Gaga's partner and a former top lieutenant to Sean Parker, has spent four years quietly building Outer Biosciences, a startup that keeps donated human skin tissue functioning outside the body for up to a month, far past the days-long industry norm.
Standard skin samples survive only a few days once removed from the body, enough to catch acute toxicity but not slower processes like collagen remodeling or barrier repair.
Outer Biosciences built a support system that feeds the tissue nutrients and clears waste, extending its usable life while keeping its cellular structure close to its original state.
Researchers can then trigger real injuries, such as UVB sunburn damage, and track weeks of recovery response in actual human tissue rather than animal models or lab-grown organoids.
An AI model predicts which untested compounds are likely to benefit a specific skin function. Those predictions get tested on the living tissue, and the results feed back into the model to sharpen its next guess.
Before AI entered the loop, the company generated roughly two viable leads in eighteen months through manual literature mining. It now produces a new candidate about every six weeks, with six leads active and dozens more logged. Four already look commercially viable for licensing to beauty and pharma partners.
Outer Biosciences has raised about 23 million dollars with a 19-person team, running its AI entirely on-premise to keep sensitive biological data off outside servers.