24 August 2026

Lady Gaga backed startup trains AI on living human skin

• Outer Bio, co-founded by Lady Gaga and Michael Polansky, built Yuna, a platform keeping full-thickness human skin alive for four weeks in a lab.
• The system feeds data from living skin into an AI model to discover new skincare compounds, cutting development time from 18 months to 6 weeks per candidate.
• The lab-grown skin lacks blood flow and immune cells, meaning results may not fully match how compounds work on skin inside a living body.

How it was covered

The Rundown AIRowan Cheung

Outer Bio, co-founded by Lady Gaga and Michael Polansky, launched Yuna, a platform that keeps full-thickness human skin alive for four weeks and feeds experimental data into an AI model that discovers skincare compounds. The system reduced discovery time from 18 months to 6 weeks per candidate, though the skin lacks blood flow and immune cells.