Lady Gaga’s Fiancé Michael Polansky Has a Biotech Startup Involving AI & Living Skin

Lady Gaga has a thriving skincare line in Haus Labs, the cosmetics brand she built from her kitchen floor to worldwide prominence.

Now, fiancé Michael Polansky says the engaged couple are mixing up Polanksy’s background in applied mathematics, computer science and the cutting-edge world of Silicon Valley tech and investment with the singer’s global brand and business acumen in search of skincare for, and of, the future.

In an interview with Tech Crunch , Polansky revealed that Gaga sits on the board of the startup Outer Biosciences , which was co-founded by Polansky in 2022 out of frustration that “the pace of innovation in biology and chemistry has never matched software, in large part because there’s no ethical way to run experiments directly on people,” according to technology news site.

Polansky and his team were reportedly not satisfied with the traditional stand-ins used by scientists, such as animal models and lab-grown organoids that mimic the structure and development of real human organs in order to better understand how real human organs behave.

So, instead of engineering a synthetic organ, the company says it ethically sourced real human skin that would typically be tossed after surgery — mostly plastic surgery — usually within hours of surgery while it is still “alive.” The samples, which are “de-identified” to protect the donor and supply organizations’ privacy, are then fed nutrients and stripped of metabolic waste to extend the sample’s viability “well past the industry norm.” Rather than the typical window of a few days to test such skin, Outer Biosciences has reportedly figured out a way to keep the tissue alive for up to four weeks.

The material, referred as Yuna, an “ex vivo human-skin platform that keeps full-thickness skin alive for four weeks,” reportedly has the ability to make 30-day-old tissue look almost identical to day-one tissue.

So, what are their plans for this typically discarded biological material? Using an AI model, the team said it can predict which untested chemicals might have a “beneficial effect on a specific skin function,” and, after being run through the living-tissue system, see if their prediction was right and improve it during the next round.

For now, the actual product is not a skincare ingredient, but the ability to find one faster.

The company’s goal, according to Polansky, 42, is to discover cosmetic ingredients, not drugs, in order to avoid a lengthy, potentially costly FDA approval process and then partner with a licensee who can bring that innovation to the commercial market in the form of serums or creams.

Polansky said that four of Outer Bioscience’s six current leads are likely to reach commercialization.