Whoever had Lady Gaga + AI + human skin on their cards, congratulations: you just won the weirdest of all bingo games. Let’s take a step back before we continue. Lady Gaga and Michael Polansky have been engaged for two-and-half years. Polansky is a smarty-pants who studied applied mathematics and computer science at Harvard, then landed in Silicon Valley after graduation by way of his childhood neighbor being Sean Parker’s assistant. Polansky eventually ran Parker’s Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, which led to him meeting Mama Gaga, who runs her daughter’s Born This Way Foundation. (I hope y’all are taking notes ’cause there will be a quiz!) Mama Gaga wanted to set Polansky up with her daughter for “months and months,” Polansky says, to which he initially responded, “I think you’re making fun of me.” (Aw!) The two finally met in late 2019 and the rest is mother monster history.

Sometime early in their relationship, Polansky and Gaga wondered, like many new couples do, “Gee, isn’t it a shame that living human tissue only lasts a few days outside the body which is nowhere near long enough to run most tests on skincare drugs/products, plus wouldn’t it be great if biochemical discoveries could be made with the speed of tech software?” The fruits of their Frankensteinian thought experiment is Outer Biosciences, a biotech startup Polansky cofounded in 2022, runs today, and just discussed with TechCrunch:

Ethically sourced living tissue: Instead of engineering a synthetic organ, the company sources human skin that would otherwise be discarded after surgery — mostly plastic surgery — through what it describes as vetted nonprofit and commercial biobanks and brokers operating under “institutional review board oversight and documented donor consent,” principally the National Disease Research Interchange and the Cooperative Human Tissue Network. … He says Outer Biosciences pays fees to these suppliers on a cost-recovery basis rather than purchasing tissue outright. He also says the company spent roughly two years on building that pipeline and handling the protocols required to receive that tissue “within hours” of surgery, while it’s still living.

The point is how the pieces fit together: Human tissue that can be kept alive for weeks, a diverse donor pool that Outer Biosciences’ team can subject to controlled experimental conditions, and repeated molecular measurements taken along the way. And it’s all fed into one, closed self-enfrocing system. An AI model predicts which untested chemicals are likely to have a beneficial effect on a specific skin function. Those chemicals get run through the living-tissue system. Then the results, whether the prediction was right or wrong, get fed back into the model, improving the next round of guesses. That loop is the actual product Outer Biosciences is selling right now: not a single skincare ingredient, but a faster way of finding one.

Quelle surprise, the process took longer before AI: Early on, the company relied on a “brute force” approach, mining scientific literature and partnering with the National Cancer Institute on natural compounds from extreme environments. That phase produced a couple of leads over about 18 months, but with AI layered in, the company is now generating a new candidate roughly every six weeks, with six leads currently active in its pipeline and several dozen additional “hits” logged.

Identifying ingredients, not drugs, means no FDA approval required: Instead, the route runs through two steps: first, getting the ingredient a standardized industry name; then safety testing under guidelines set by the OECD, a Paris-based international body whose member countries agree to accept each other’s properly run studies. A partner outfit then commercializes the whole thing. Indeed, rather than build its own consumer brand, Outer Biosciences right now plans to license or sell its finished ingredients to beauty or pharma outfits that will then formulate these into actual products (a serum, a cream) and bring them to market under their own brands. Already, four of Outer Biosciences’ six current leads look likely to reach commercialization, Polansky says.

An ethical use of AI? Unlike AI companies training on scraping the internet, there is no “biology internet” to scrape. And Outer Biosciences has two other reasons to focus on its own knitting. First, the data it generates doesn’t exist anywhere else, which, conceivably, makes the company’s position more defensible, if a lot slower, to build than “traditional” software-based AI startups. Second, it’s cheaper to run, with modest compute demands compared with training a large language model. In fact, all of the company’s AI work currently runs on-premise, not in the cloud, because “we don’t want the data in the cloud,” Polansky says.

[From TechCrunch]

This is A LOT to digest. But like they say: the couple who creates a biotech startup that uses AI and live human skin to identify potential ingredients for skincare products together, stays together. If you’re wondering how Gaga fits into all this, she’s on the Outer Biosciences board, while one of their scientists sits on a science advisory board for her makeup line, Haus Labs. Me being the specific kind of freak that I am, I’m less skeeved out by the whole human skin element (though I will note, the landing page for Outer Biosciences’ website has real The Substance energy), and more perturbed by the AI of it all. And speaking of, how can the intricacies of organic chemistry not require a large language model? Soooooo many questions…

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