Michael Polansky is busy.
In the last decade, he’s cofounded a philanthropic nonprofit, launched an early-stage venture capital firm, helmed an asset management firm, got engaged to Lady Gaga, and somehow, had time to become a Grammy-nominated artist for co-writing seven songs on his fiancée’s sixth studio album, “Mayhem.”
He and Lady Gaga also just welcomed their first child together.
He’s no stranger to the spotlight, but one of his most ambitious projects to date has remained largely unknown to the public.
“We made the decision internally that we weren’t going to talk about what we were doing until the data we generated was publication worthy,” Polansky told Business Insider.
That moment came late last month.
“We are building the future of skin health,” Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, wrote on X on August 21. “Welcome from Michael, Me and the entire team at Outer Bio.”
Founded in 2020, Outer Bio is a Massachusetts-based company that studies human skin to discover new bioactive ingredients, or compounds that can affect living tissue. Ideally, for Outer Bio, those ingredients could be used across a variety of industries, from pharmaceutical to beauty. Lady Gaga sits on the board of directors.
“If you imagine products in Ulta or CVS, they have all sorts of active ingredients in them,” Polansky said. “We would have proprietary active ingredients in products that were sold by other people.”
Outer Bio’s research
Studying human skin is tricky. Conducting tests on living people is highly regulated and an ethical minefield, while options like artificial skin and lab-grown organoids don’t provide the same insights as actual skin. Plus, skin living outside the body can die quickly, making it difficult to conduct long-term studies.
That’s where Yuna, a research and development system Outer Bio developed in 2022, comes into play. It can keep living, full-thickness human skin observable for four weeks, the company says. The platform includes a 3D printed support structure that helps deliver nutrients to the skin tissue and remove waste.
Yuna is just one cog in Outer Bio’s machine, though.
Outer Bio also collects donated living skin samples from a network of sources — hospitals, biobanks, medical research centers — that are typically left over from surgery or elective medical procedures. The team processes the skin tissue in-house, sometimes turning a single piece into dozens of samples. Then, the skin is prepped for experimentation and placed in custom-made well plates.
Outer Bio says it is focused on several research areas, including wound healing, pigmentation, chronic inflammation, aging, and skin barrier function.
“We will often remove samples throughout the month to collect data at different points in time,” Polansky said. “Every single experiment has the freedom to be different depending on what the questions are and what the data is. Then that goes through our data generation process.”
The company uses AI models trained on the data it collects to predict which compounds could have bioactive or toxic effects on human skin. The skin is processed by its systems, and the results are fed back into the AI models to improve their predictive capabilities.
Polansky said that data collection is Outer Bio’s north star.
“We’re moving into an era where the amount of innovation that’s needed in biology and life sciences is going too slowly,” Polansky said. “I think that the only way that goes faster is that we have better data.”
Polansky said there’s been progress in the biology and life sciences fields, but biological data collection for AI models is still growing.
“We think of ourselves as a data company first and foremost,” Polansky said. “We’re not generative AI. We’re predictive AI.”
Partnerships
Although Outer Bio is focused on data, they’ve also secured partnerships with companies that can turn the bioactive ingredients they’ve discovered into real products.
“As we discover chemicals or mechanisms that have immediate commercial or human relevance, it would be silly not to take advantage of that,” Polansky said.
Lady Gaga’s cosmetics brand, Haus Labs, was an early partner with Outer Bio. Polansky also sits on the board of directors for Haus Labs.
“The Haus Labs partnership is unique because Stefani and I are both involved with both companies,” Polansky said. “It’s super aligned, but we are working with other beauty companies that do totally different things with us than what Haus Labs does. Haus Labs’ ambitions around innovation are very unique to them.”
Polansky said that, ultimately, Outer Bio can push forward the skin health industry and biological machine learning.
“One of the things that I like about this company is that it truly is a scientific and technical problem that is very hard,” he said. “No matter how long it took us to solve it, it would’ve been worth it because it opens up so many possibilities.”
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