Lady Gaga’s fiancé is training AI to keep human skin tissue alive outside the body
Lady Gaga’s fiancé has spent the past few years quietly working on a project that sounds like something pulled straight from science fiction.
Michael Polansky is best known to many people for his relationship with the Poker Face and Bad Romance singer, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, but away from their high-profile life together, he has also been building an AI and biology startup.
Polansky co-founded Outer Biosciences in 2022 alongside chief scientist Kyung-Jin Jang, CTO Chris Hinojosa and chief business officer Stanley King.
The company employs 19 people and has raised roughly $23 million, yet until recently, Polansky says he barely discussed what it was doing with even his close friends.
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Now, though, what they have been working on is pretty remarkable.
Reported by TechCrunch, Outer Biosciences has developed technology that can keep real human skin tissue alive outside the body for as long as a month whilst using it to gather data capable of training an AI model.
The tissue largely comes from material that would otherwise be discarded following surgery, particularly plastic surgery.
According to Polansky, it is sourced through vetted non-profit and commercial organisations under institutional review board oversight and documented donor consent, with samples arriving at the company already de-identified.
The team has then created a support system which supplies the tissue with nutrients and removes metabolic waste.
Ordinarily, tissue used for research remains viable for just a short number of days. Outer Biosciences says its system gives researchers weeks to observe slower biological processes such as pigmentation changes, collagen remodelling and barrier repair.
What’s more, researchers can even expose the skin to UVB radiation and follow its response over the subsequent weeks.
However, Polansky stressed that the researchers aren't ‘healing’ the tissue. Instead, they can observe an injury and study what happens biologically afterwards.
As for how AI changes things, the company's model works to predict which chemicals could potentially have a beneficial effect on a particular skin function. Researchers then test those candidates on living tissue before feeding the results back into the model, regardless of whether its prediction was correct.
That feedback allows the system to improve its future predictions.
Polansky said the company initially took a ‘brute force’ approach to finding useful compounds and produced only a couple of leads over around 18 months. With AI added to the process, he claims Outer Biosciences is now generating a new candidate approximately every six weeks.
It currently has six active leads, with four appearing likely to reach commercialisation.
Rather than launching its own skincare range, the company plans to license or sell ingredients to beauty and pharmaceutical businesses that could eventually use them in products such as creams or serums.
Gaga also has a role in the unusual venture, sitting on Outer Biosciences' board, whilst it has collaborated on projects with her cosmetics company Haus Labs.
After keeping the startup largely under wraps, Polansky said: “Trying to do this in private is hard.”
Explaining why the team is finally speaking publicly, he added: “We kind of want to start working in public now.”
That said, after years of secrecy, he appears ready for people to find out exactly what he's been doing.
Polansky said: “I think it’s going to be fun…to have people know that this is what we’ve been doing.”
Topics: Lady Gaga, Artificial Intelligence, Celebrity
Ben Williams