Lady Gaga's fiance builds an AI skin health startup

You'd expect Michael Polanski's biggest headline this year to be his engagement, his new baby, or his Grammy nod for co-writing on Lady Gaga's "Mayhem". Instead, he just went public with a six-year-old biotech company that quietly outgrew all of that.

Polansky told Business Insider the team deliberately held off on announcing anything until their data was "publication worthy". 

That moment arrived on 21 August, when Lady Gaga, born Stefani Germanotta, introduced Outer Bio and its research platform, Yuna, on X. She sits on the company's board alongside her role co-writing that Grammy-nominated record.

Researching human live skin is challenging. Experiments on humans create ethical problems; artificial tissues such as organoids cannot be compared with real tissues, and tissues detached from humans die after several days.

The solution proposed by Outer Bio is called Yuna. It allows maintaining full-thickness donated skin alive for four weeks thanks to 3D printing technology providing conditions similar to physiological ones in terms of supply of nutrition and removal of metabolic products.

Donated skin is supplied from hospitals, biobanks, or scientific organisations specialising in the field of medicine. The company itself processes each sample, sometimes dividing one piece of tissue into dozens of samples for testing in special well plates.

Researchers pull data at different points across the four-week window, feeding results into AI models built to predict which compounds carry bioactive or toxic effects. Polansky described the company's focus bluntly: "We're not generative AI. We're predictive AI."

Outer Bio isn't just collecting data for its own sake. It has already partnered with beauty companies to turn discovered compounds into commercial products, starting with Lady Gaga's Haus Labs, where Polansky also holds a board seat. He was careful to note that other beauty partners pursue entirely different goals than Haus Labs does with the same underlying research.

Polansky called the underlying science "a very hard" problem, one he says was worth the years it took to reach this point. With donated tissue samples and predictive models now running in parallel, Outer Bio's next test will be whether its bioactive discoveries can move from petri dishes into products people actually buy.