Lady Gaga's tech CEO fiancée is training an AI model on data collected from human skin

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'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.

"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."

Meet @outerbio and YUNA. We are building the future of skin health. https://t.co/0PsbHPTIAXWelcome 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."

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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.

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.