Michael Polansky is remarkably unassuming for someone operating in a corner of the world known for outsize egos.<\/p>\n
Seated at a leafy patio outside a popular bakery in Mill Valley, an affluent town about 15 miles north of San Francisco, Polansky \u2014 bespectacled, his fresh face framed by dark hair shot through with gray \u2014 has the look and the friendly demeanor of a young professor.<\/p>\n
He is, in fact, both the founder of a buzzy AI and biology startup called Outer Biosciences<\/a> and the creative, business, and romantic partner to Stefani Germanotta \u2014 better known as Lady Gaga. It\u2019s an unlikely double life. On the one hand, the couple invariably moves in the world that comes with celebrity; on the other, he\u2019s running an outfit that has spent years figuring out how to keep living human tissue alive outside the body \u2014 for over a month, so far \u2014 without anyone outside the company knowing.<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t see any of it coming. Polansky grew up in Minnesota and went on to Harvard, where he studied applied mathematics and computer science, graduating in 2006. Afterward, he logged three years at the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates \u2014 \u201ca very unique place,\u201d Polansky says over coffee, and one where he had \u201ca really good experience,\u201d even if it wasn\u2019t a place he was going to \u201cwake up and be excited about . . .every day.\u201d<\/p>\n His pilgrimage from Bridgewater to Silicon Valley ran through Minnesota. By coincidence, Sean Parker\u2019s assistant at the time had been Polansky\u2019s neighbor growing up. At a 2007 wedding in their home state, she mentioned that Parker was looking for someone to work with him. Polansky already knew who Parker was and was looking to move west. The two had dinner in New York, \u201chit it off immediately,\u201d and, as Polansky tells it, he quit Bridgewater the next day and moved to San Francisco.<\/p>\n He first landed a role as a principal at Founders Fund when the firm was run by its four original partners \u2014 Peter Thiel, Sean Parker, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery \u2013 with Polansky and another young principal at the time, Brian Singerman, sharing an office. \u201cIt was a really, really great experience,\u201d Polansky says.<\/p>\n When Parker left Founders Fund after becoming liquid in his Facebook stock and wanted to build out his own family office, he brought Polansky with him. Polansky ran that office \u2014 handling Parker\u2019s business, investment, and philanthropic interests, including helping stand up the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (where Polansky remains executive director<\/a>) until COVID, when his life \u201cmoved in a different direction.\u201d<\/p>\n That change had a lot to do with Germanotta. Polansky met her in late 2019 at one of Parker\u2019s birthday parties. Charmingly, the meeting came at the urging of her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, president of the Born This Way Foundation<\/a>, whom Polansky had come to know through his philanthropic work.<\/p>\n \u201cShe had said, you know, for months and months, \u2018I want to set you up with my daughter,\u2019\u201d Polansky recalls. \u201cI was like, I think you\u2019re making fun of me.\u201d She wasn\u2019t. When their own mothers later met, he says, laughing, \u201cit all made perfect sense.\u201d (His mother and Germanotta\u2019s mother are now close friends.)<\/p>\n Their relationship is a full partnership, professionally and personally. Notably, for Gaga\u2019s most recent world tour, which began in July of last year and ended in April, the couple managed a massive operation across three 747s, something Polansky compares to running \u201ca 200-person startup that travels around the world every day.\u201d<\/p>\n It also includes Haus Labs, the cosmetics brand Germanotta initially built \u201con her kitchen floor,\u201d Polansky says, instead of simply licensing her name to an existing company. That business, based in El Segundo, California, an operation with roughly 70 employees, is reportedly thriving<\/a>.<\/p>\n Germanotta also sits on the board of Outer Biosciences, and the two companies collaborate at the margins. For example, Outer Biosciences\u2019 chief scientist, Kyung-Jin Jang, sits on Haus Labs\u2019 scientific advisory board, and the companies have run some joint projects.<\/p>\n Says Polansky, beaming as he talks about her from our sun-dappled table: \u201cPeople really haven\u2019t gotten to know a certain side of her publicly \u2026 She\u2019s such a brilliant businessperson.\u201d<\/p>\n From cancer to tissue in a dish<\/p>\n While Polansky is also a businessperson, he\u2019s not a scientist. He got into life sciences \u201caccidentally,\u201d he says, through more than a decade spent alongside Parker in cancer immunotherapy, a field that was \u201cvery fringe\u201d when they entered it.<\/p>\n Outer Biosciences, which Polansky founded in 2022 and where he is CEO, grew out of frustration that the pace of innovation in biology and chemistry has never matched software, in large part because there\u2019s no ethical way to run experiments directly on people. Meanwhile, the proxies scientists rely on instead \u2014 animal models, simplified cell cultures, lab-grown organoids \u2014 are poor stand-ins for how a real human organ behaves.<\/p>\n So Outer Biosciences took a different approach. Instead of engineering a synthetic organ, the company sources human skin that would otherwise be discarded after surgery \u2013 mostly plastic surgery \u2013 through what it describes as vetted non-profit and commercial biobanks and brokers operating under \u201cinstitutional review board oversight and documented donor consent,\u201d principally the National Disease Research Interchange and the Cooperative Human Tissue Network. (Both outfits receive federal funding from the NIH and the National Cancer Institute without being federally operated.)<\/p>\n Polansky is careful to note that there is no single government tissue network that qualifies buyers. 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 \u201cwithin hours\u201d of surgery, while it\u2019s still living.<\/p>\n Asked about the donors\u2019 privacy, he says that every sample arrives already de-identified \u2014 stripped upstream by the supplying organizations of names, contact information and other direct identifiers. A proprietary support system developed by his team then feeds the tissue nutrients and removes metabolic waste, extending its viable life well past the industry norm.<\/p>\n That norm, by the way, is a matter of days. That\u2019s enough time to test for acute toxicity, but not for slower biological processes like collagen remodeling, pigmentation change, or barrier repair that take weeks to unfold. (Dermatologists routinely tell patients to expect changes over a matter of weeks for this same reason.)<\/p>\n Outer Biosciences\u2019 system meanwhile keeps tissue alive for up to a month, says Polansky, who says it retains its \u201cday-zero architecture and preserves its day-zero epidermal, stromal and immune-associated molecular programs.\u201d In plainer English, that means that 30-day-old tissue cared for by the company looks a lot like day-one tissue, but it isn\u2019t fully indistinguishable from it.<\/p>\n Sunburn is one of the clearer examples of what that extra time buys Outer Biosciences. Polansky says that its researchers can induce UVB damage in living tissue, then track the stress, inflammatory, and recovery-related responses that follow over the following weeks as an information-gathering exercise. He says the team isn\u2019t \u201chealing\u201d the skin but rather watching an injury happen and then watching the biology that follows it over time.<\/p>\n Perhaps anticipating pushback from the scientific community, Polansky is careful about how he frames the company\u2019s achievements when this reporter asks questions about rival technologies. The startup\u2019s value, he says, isn\u2019t any one piece of what it\u2019s doing but how the pieces fit together: human tissue that can be kept alive for weeks, a diverse donor pool that Outer Biosciences\u2019 team can subject to controlled experimental conditions, and repeated molecular measurements taken along the way.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s all fed into one, closed self-enforcing 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a giant improvement from where things started, says Polansky. Early on, the company relied on a \u201cbrute force\u201d 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 \u201chits\u201d logged.<\/p>\n What makes that pace truly astonishing, Polansky says as the crowd around us thins out, is the size of the current universe of skin-active ingredients.<\/p>\n It\u2019s almost impossible to know the exact number, but it\u2019s small. \u201cActive ingredient\u201d means something different informally than it does formally. While the FDA maintains rules covering 13 categories of over-the-counter skin drugs (think sunscreen, antifungals), across all of them, only about 120 to 130 active ingredients are approved. Add cosmetic ingredients backed by actual research, says Polansky, and that number is closer to 200.<\/p>\n This, of course, presents opportunities.<\/p>\n Outer Biosciences is discovering cosmetic ingredients, not drugs, so there\u2019s no FDA approval to seek out. 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\u2019s properly run studies \u2014 meaning a study done correctly in one participating country is accepted in the other 40-plus.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 six current leads look likely to reach commercialization, Polansky says.<\/p>\n In the meantime, the company is generating money from collaborative research partnerships, including a pharmaceutical partner that\u2019s studying why certain cancer drugs cause severe skin rashes, and consumer beauty brands that are testing whether Outer Biosciences\u2019 data holds up against their own product-development and marketing needs.<\/p>\n If Polansky is raising more money for the company currently, he won\u2019t say. To date, the company has raised roughly $23 million, with early backers including Calm Capital, Brighter Capital and Polansky\u2019s own investing firm, Hawktail, among others. The company employs 19 people, with all but Polansky based just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n Asked why he\u2019s chosen now to talk about the company after years of near-total silence \u2014 he says he barely discussed it even with close friends \u2014 Polansky points to the data the team is beginning to amass and the confidence that has given them. \u201cTrying to do this in private is hard,\u201d he says, as the wait staff start flipping chairs onto tabletops, signaling it\u2019s closing time at the bakery. \u201cWe kind of want to start working in public now,\u201d he adds, shrugging.<\/p>\n Outer Biosciences is not the only company chasing this idea, even if its use of real tissue, rather than synthetic, is distinctive. <\/p>\n