Outer Bio, the bioactives discovery platform founded by US entrepreneur Michael Polansky and singer/Haus Labs founder Lady Gaga, is on a mission to push beyond the limitations of conventional skin care research.
The business, quietly established around 2021 before publicly announcing itself in August 2026, focuses on discovering and testing new approaches to skin health, namely via the company’s discovery platform, Yuna.
Yuna is an ex vivo human-skin platform that enables skin to stay alive and measurable for four weeks.
Gaga, whose birth name is Stefani Germanotta, recently revealed herself to be a part of Outer Bio’s Board of Directors alongside Polansky, who is also CEO of the company – making for a powerhouse pair seeking to shake things up.
And the work Outer Bio is undertaking is not innovation for innovation’s sake, but to meet a growing consumer demand for more effective skin care products in 2026 and beyond.
“The consumer demand for efficacious skin care and beauty products is extraordinary,” says Polansky.
“The consumer themselves does not [talk] down to [the category], they are very smart, and they know what they want.
“They can tell that they care about the difference between something that works and something that does not, and they are always on the hunt for something that works better.”
But there lies one major issue, according to Polansky, which is the “glacial pace” at which new active ingredients are being discovered.
He explains: “Trying to innovate in that world [can feel] virtually impossible.
“I think the category has used words like ‘innovate’, ‘technology’ and ‘science’ to the best of their ability, but there has been a natural limitation on what that could look like.”
So, why is this level of innovation not happening in beauty, and what role does Outer Bio have in breaking through skin care innovation’s glass ceiling?
How Outer Bio is breaking through skin care’s innovation bottleneck
Michael Polansky, CEO and co-founder of Outer Bio
Elaborating on this innovation drought further, Polansky questions why the industry has not found an active ingredient better than retinol or hyaluronic acid.
This frustration was most apparent when viewing the work Germanotta was doing with her own make-up brand Haus Labs.
Polansky explains: “I watched Stefani kind of exhaust most available options to her, and still want to go a lot harder and faster.
“It is like, okay, now you see where the natural ceiling is, and she kept asking, ‘Why can’t I do this? Why can’t I do that? Why can’t we get that data? Where does this come from?’”
Haus Labs was founded in 2019 by Germanotta, before the company underwent a major rebrand and relaunch to its current name in 2022 and updated its range with a focus on ‘clean’ formulations.
Polansky continues: “Stefani and I love working together, and so it was a really fun way to collaborate.
“I do not think I had very much to contribute to what she was doing in Haus Labs at the time, but it ended up really working very well because we were able to support each other.”
I would also like to see some real progress with the machine learning side of what we are doing
Enter Yuna, which claims to unite living human skin tissue, automated in vitro screening and biomedical artificial intelligence (AI), to discover new molecules and mechanisms to advance skin health.
Yuna is a Korean name with personal meaning to Kyung-Jin Jang, Outer Bio’s Chief Scientific Officer.
“The characters used in the name convey radiance and nourishment ‘Yun’, and beauty and grace ‘A’,” according to a statement from Outer Bio.
“Together, they reflect Outer Bio’s vision for the platform: to deepen our understanding of living human skin and advance skin health and longevity.”
For Polansky, Yuna represents a significant leap forward in research potential.
He adds: “For example, an animal model of a mouse is a very common research platform for preclinical biology research, and in some cases it is great.
“What you learn about from a mouse is translatable to what would happen in humans.
“But in other cases, it is a terrible surrogate, and almost not worth spending any time doing research on it because even if you learn something, it would not help you as you start trying to actually make something to help a person.”
How Outer Bio developed Yuna and why it is pushing innovation forward
In essence, the ability to keep skin alive for four weeks is a huge metric for skin care innovation, particularly when it comes to testing a product over a longer period of time.
Polansky argues that when a consumer visits a dermatologist and they give them a cream, they do not say, “come back tomorrow”.
Like with most skin care claims, results become more apparent over longer periods of time.
Polansky continues: “If we can observe it in this [Yuna], it is a lot more trustworthy when we want to think about translating it into a product because we are studying it in the native architecture of the skin itself.”
He stresses, however, that all testing methods all have their “strengths and weaknesses.”
“It is not like our model is good and every other model is bad,” he adds.
“We think we are getting at [what would happen in a person] from a much closer starting point than proxying it multiple layers back.
“We want to study the full diversity of human skin to understand what makes something work in one person and not in another person, or what would be best for you but would not work for me.
Keeping skin alive for four weeks sounds like something out of science fiction [does anyone else remember that one episode of the British television series Doctor Who with Casandra?], so what does this all actually look like in the lab?
Polansky explains: “The starting point is a piece of human skin that has been sourced ethically, and in keeping with really important standards about how tissue is procured and used for research.
“It is a shape and size that is not standard, and there are typical rough sizes, because a lot of the surgical procedures that lead to the tissue we receive are similar, so we tend to see similar patterns in them.
“But we receive it as a [diverse set] of raw tissue, and then we process it in-house and cut it into circular shapes.
“The organisation of the cells and of the appendages and all of the different components of skin actually have a really specific architecture that is very important.
“You could not just take a bunch of skin cells in gel and say, ‘Okay, this is a good surrogate for skin’, because the organisation of the cells and all of the different components of skin actually have a really specific architecture.
Stefani and I have been working together on how we talk about this publicly
“By having that intact at every layer, we are able [to get back] to that translation point.”
But what happens when a discovery is uncovered using Yuna? Polansky states a discovery could mean discovering a compound that has never been used before – “it is a novel compound, or something that’s never been tried”.
He adds: “We bias our screening towards things that have never been tried on skin, because we want to find things that are genuinely novel, rather than just incremental adjustments to existing compounds.
“Typically, what that means is finding something that can be patented or otherwise protected in some way, which would justify taking it further and developing something with it.”
The future of Outer Bio
Looking ahead, Polansky says the business is currently very focused on partnering with existing companies that have consumer products, brands and distribution in place.
He adds: “What we want to do is take it to the place where we [can provide] really great data, a good understanding of safety, understanding of mechanism, how to formulate it and how it interacts with other chemicals.”
Polansky’s ambitions over the next year are to create partnerships and a product development pipeline producing finished products that are going to be brought to market.
He adds: “By then, on the scientific side, I would also like to see some real progress with the machine learning side of what we are doing.
“Our AI is not generative; it is much more traditional and has been around for a long time, and so I would love to see that process leading to really interesting findings and discovery.
“That is ultimately where the scale comes from.”
At the same time, what does the reveal of Gaga’s involvement in the company mean for its future?
Germanotta’s role was kept quiet up until August of this year, with Polansky stating at the time that “the attention that Germanotta’s involvement would bring was not necessary – it is not consumer-facing”.
However, he concedes that there is “certainly an element of elevating the amount of exposure that a project like this can have”.
He explains: “Often [at] times, it is really hard to break through when you are working on something very technical, because the communication is either too technical for a general audience, or is watered down so much that the complexity of what is going on is lost.
“I think there are journalists who do a beautiful job of capturing the complexity of what is happening but also make it accessible to people without a technical background.
“What I do not want to do is have to rely on other people talking about what we are doing, and .
“She has a very natural way of expressing things, and I do not use social media myself, but she does, and she understands what would be interesting to somebody, certainly within her audience and among her fans.”
But beyond the commercial opportunities, what was personally most striking was the respect and love Polansky expressed for Germanotta – which was abundantly clear during the conversation.
Polansky says: “I am very lucky, especially because she truly is one of a kind, and I know a lot of people think that, and it is right, rightly so.
“This is a side of her that I think a lot of people do not see, and [Outer Bio] was very much born out of the merging of both of our backgrounds at a time when we were merging our lives.”
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