Michael Polansky’s Outer Biosciences Uses AI and Living Human Skin to Find New Skincare Ingredients

A stealth biotech company that has spent roughly four years operating quietly out of the public eye has just revealed what it’s been building. Outer Biosciences, co-founded and led by Michael Polansky — best known publicly as the partner of singer Lady Gaga — emerged from stealth around 21 August 2026, after a profile by TechCrunch drew widespread attention to its work. And what that work involves is genuinely unusual.

The company has developed a laboratory system called YUNA that can keep full-thickness donated human skin tissue alive and functioning outside the body for more than 30 days. To put that in context, the standard industry norm for keeping excised human skin viable is measured in days, not weeks. Outer Biosciences says YUNA achieves this by carefully controlling the delivery of nutrients to the tissue and removing metabolic waste products — essentially giving the skin what it needs to keep behaving as it would in a living person, for long enough to run repeated experiments on it.

The skin itself comes from surgical procedures, primarily plastic surgery, where tissue would otherwise be discarded. Patients consent to its use for research. Once in the lab, that tissue becomes the testing ground for potential new skincare compounds, with AI and machine-learning models trained on the resulting experimental data to predict which candidates are likely to be safe and effective.

Not a Cream. A Discovery Engine.

It’s worth being clear about what Outer Biosciences actually sells, because it isn’t a moisturiser or a serum. The company’s product is the discovery platform itself — a faster, more human-relevant method of finding and validating skincare ingredients, which it can then license or sell to cosmetics and pharmaceutical companies. According to reports citing the company’s own claims, YUNA can generate a new candidate ingredient roughly every six weeks through its iterative testing and AI-driven prediction cycle.

Polansky’s background is in tech investment. He spent years as a senior deputy to Sean Parker, the entrepreneur known for his early roles at Napster and Facebook. Building a biotech company is a significant departure from that world, and Outer Biosciences has apparently been in development since around 2022 before going public this month.

Lady Gaga has amplified the announcement on social media, bringing the story to a far wider audience than a typical biotech launch would reach.

The Animal Testing Angle

One of the more immediately practical implications of Outer Biosciences’ platform is what it could mean for animal testing. In the UK and across the EU, testing cosmetic products or their ingredients on animals is already banned. Companies operating in these markets must rely on alternatives — in vitro cell cultures, computational models, and ex vivo human tissue among them. A platform that keeps real human skin viable for over a month, and can run dozens of iterative tests on it, fits squarely within that regulatory environment.

Animal welfare advocates are likely to welcome a technology that could reduce the need for animal models in dermatology and cosmetics research. But the use of human tissue isn’t without its own ethical questions. Some commentators have raised concerns about the consent processes for surgical patients whose discarded tissue is used in commercial research, and about who ultimately owns the data generated from experiments on that tissue. AI-ethics observers may also question how transparent the predictive models are, and whether there’s a risk of over-relying on algorithmic predictions before compounds reach proper clinical trials.

Regulators in the UK, including the Human Tissue Authority, which oversees the ethical use of human material under the Human Tissue Act 2004, would expect any operation using donated human tissue to meet strict consent and storage standards. Outer Biosciences is reported to be operating in the United States, where similar but distinct regulatory frameworks apply.

What the Science Actually Claims

It’s important to be precise here. The figures Outer Biosciences puts forward — more than 30 days of tissue viability, a new candidate ingredient every six weeks — are reported company claims, repeated across technology and biotech media. They have not yet been corroborated by peer-reviewed scientific publications, and no official regulatory body has validated them independently. That doesn’t make them false, but it does mean they should be read as the company’s own account of its capabilities at this stage.

Michael Polansky has not yet given a widely quoted public interview on the technical specifics, though TechCrunch’s profile has been the primary vehicle for the company’s emergence. The story is still developing, and independent scientific scrutiny will be the next real test of YUNA’s claims.

For the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries, the pitch is straightforward. Shorter development cycles, data derived from actual human tissue rather than animal models or simplified cell cultures, and AI-driven prediction to filter out poor candidates early — all of that could reduce R&D costs and improve the odds that a compound actually works when it reaches human trials.

What This Means for Kent Residents

Outer Biosciences has no reported facilities, trials, or partnerships in Kent, so any direct local impact is some way off. For Kent consumers, the more immediate relevance is as shoppers: if major cosmetics brands adopt platforms like YUNA, future skincare products may increasingly carry claims about AI-driven, human-tissue-based testing rather than animal testing — something worth looking out for on the label. Anyone buying topical treatments for skin conditions, whether over the counter or prescribed, should continue to check that products carry the relevant approvals from bodies such as the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for medicinal products, or the Office for Product Safety and Standards for cosmetics, regardless of how the underlying ingredients were discovered.