After Haus Labs, Lady Gaga enters biotech with Outer Biosciences The popstar's new startup uses artificial intelligence and living human skin to search for the next ingredients in skincare

First came the AI-Mirrors, capable of analyzing the skin and suggesting products, then the algorithms that try to understand what scent we might like starting from our Pinterest boards. Artificial intelligence is entering beauty from all directions: it personalizes, recommends, interprets tastes and images, but above all it begins to intervene in the way in which products are designed. An example? Outer Biosciences, Lady Gaga's new project that works between AI, biology and skincare. Gaga co-founded it in 2020 with Michael Polansky, her partner in life and business, and she sits on the board of directors. After years of working almost in stealth mode, the company came out of the closet telling something very different from Haus Labs. Forget glitter and lipstick for a moment, the new chapter of the pop star empire is not yet another celebrity beauty brand, but a research company that seeks new cosmetic ingredients using artificial intelligence and human tissues. The laboratory starts from living human skin, coming mainly from tissues that would be discarded after surgery. The samples are provided, according to the company, through biobanks and intermediaries with documented and anonymized consent. The real difference lies in their duration. While many tissues used in research remain viable for only a few days, Outer Biosciences claims to be able to keep them alive for up to 30 days thanks to the Yuna platform. This extra time allows us to observe slower phenomena, such as collagen remodeling, pigmentation, inflammation and skin barrier repair.

AI searches, skin answers: Lady Gaga's new skincare adventure has something to do with artificial intelligence

The way Outer Biosciences works almost seems like a conversation between algorithm and human tissue. The AI identifies chemicals that could have an effect on a certain skin function. The researchers test them on living tissues and the results are then returned to the model, which uses that data to improve subsequent predictions. Not only successful experiments count, but also those that refute the initial hypothesis become new data. According to Michael Polansky, this system has also changed the speed of the search. Initially, Outer Biosciences had identified some candidates in about 18 months; with the introduction of AI, the company claims to be able to generate one every six weeks. At the moment, the pipeline includes six main candidates, while other results are still being studied. The goal is not to create an app that tells us which cream to buy, but to build a faster method to discover new skincare ingredients before they even become products. And in fact, Outer Biosciences does not want to become another beauty brand. The idea is to license or sell the developed ingredients to cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies, who can transform them into serums, creams and other products. According to Polansky, four of the six main candidates would already have a good chance of making it to market. The company also generates revenue through research collaborations, including with a pharmaceutical company that studies the skin reactions caused by certain anticancer drugs and with beauty brands interested in verifying their development processes. In other words, Outer Biosciences works behind the product. Its name may never end up on the bottle, but one of its ingredients does.

The beauty that comes before the product

Outer Biosciences has raised about 23 million dollars and has 19 employees. Its advantage, as Polansky explained to TechCrunch, lies in using data generated through human tissues in a local environment instead of relying on the cloud. The reason is that, unlike AI models that can be trained on an almost infinite amount of content available online, biology does not have a Google equivalent from which to download millions of examples of human skin. The project is also part of the search for alternatives to animal experimentation, an increasingly important topic for the cosmetics industry and particularly relevant in Europe where the use of animals to test cosmetics is prohibited. So, if the AI-mirrors work on our face and the algorithms try to predict the scent we will choose, Outer Biosciences intervenes even earlier, that is, when a cosmetic does not yet exist. Lady Gaga, who with Haus Labs has already transformed her aesthetics into a beauty business, this time she does not put her name on a product. It invests in technology that could help decide which products will hit shelves tomorrow. Perhaps the next level of beauty tech won't be using AI just to sell us something, but to figure out what to sell.