迈克尔·波兰斯基（Michael Polansky）正在活体皮肤上训练人工智能模型

迈克尔·波兰斯基（Michael Polansky）对于一个在世界的一个以极度自负着称的角落工作的人来说是非常谦虚的。

波兰斯基坐在距旧金山以北约15英里的富裕小镇米尔谷一家颇受欢迎的面包店外绿树成荫的露台上，戴着眼镜，黑发中夹杂着灰色的清新脸庞，有着年轻教授的外表和友好的举止。

He is, in fact, both the co-founder of a buzzy AI and biology startup calledOuter Biosciencesand the creative, business, and romantic partner to Stefani Germanotta — better known as Lady Gaga. It’s an unlikely double life. On the one hand, the couple invariably moves in the world that comes with celebrity; on the other, he’s running an outfit that has spent years figuring out how to keep living human tissue alive outside the body — for over a month, so far — without anyone outside the company knowing.

He didn’t 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 — “a very unique place,” Polansky says over coffee, and one where he had “a really good experience,” even if it wasn’t a place he was going to “wake up and be excited about . . .every day.”

His pilgrimage from Bridgewater to Silicon Valley ran through Minnesota. By coincidence, Sean Parker’s assistant at the time had been Polansky’s neighbor growing up. At a 2009 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, “hit it off immediately,” and, as Polansky tells it, he quit Bridgewater the next day and moved to San Francisco.

他第一次在Founders Fund担任负责人，当时该公司由四位原始合伙人——彼得·泰尔 (Peter Thiel)、肖恩·帕克 (Sean Parker)、卢克·诺塞克 (Luke Nosek) 和肯·豪厄里 (Ken Howery) 运营，与波兰斯基和当时另一位年轻的负责人布莱恩·辛格曼 (Brian Singerman) 共用一间办公室。 “这真是一次非常棒的经历，”波兰斯基说。

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 — handling Parker’s business, investment, and philanthropic interests, including helping stand up the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (where Polansky remainsexecutive director) until COVID, when his life “moved in a different direction.”

这种变化与杰尔马诺塔有很大关系。波兰斯基于2019年底在帕克的一场生日聚会上认识了她。令人着迷的是，这次会面是在她母亲辛西娅·杰尔马诺塔（Cynthia Germanotta）的敦促下举行的，辛西娅·杰尔马诺塔是“天生如此基金会”的主席，波兰斯基是通过慈善工作认识的。

“She had said, you know, for months and months, ‘I want to set you up with my daughter,’” Polansky recalls. “I was like, I think you’re making fun of me.” She wasn’t. When their own mothers later met, he says, laughing, “it all made perfect sense.” (His mother and Germanotta’s mother are now close friends.)

Their relationship is a full partnership, professionally and personally. Notably, for Gaga’s 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 “a 200-person startup that travels around the world every day.”

波兰斯基说，它还包括Haus Labs，这是化妆品品牌Germanotta最初“在她的厨房地板上”建立的，而不是简单地将她的名字授权给现有公司。据报道，该公司总部位于加利福尼亚州埃尔塞贡多，拥有大约70名员工，业务蒸蒸日上。

Germanotta also sits on the board of Outer Biosciences, and the two companies collaborate at the margins. For example, Outer Biosciences’ chief scientist, Kyung-Jin Jang, sits on Haus Labs’ scientific advisory board, and the companies have run some joint projects.

Says Polansky, beaming as he talks about her from our sun-dappled table: “People really haven’t gotten to know a certain side of her publicly … She’s such a brilliant businessperson.”

从癌症到培养皿中的组织

While Polansky is also a businessperson, he’s not a scientist. He got into life sciences “accidentally,” he says, through more than a decade spent alongside Parker in cancer immunotherapy, a field that was “very fringe” when they entered it.

Outer Biosciences, co-founded in 2022 by Polansky (CEO), Jang, Chris Hinojosa (CTO), and Stanley King (chief business officer), grew out of frustration that the pace of innovation in biology and chemistry has never matched software, in large part because there’s no ethical way to run experiments directly on people. Meanwhile, the proxies scientists rely on instead — animal models, simplified cell cultures, lab-grown organoids — are poor stand-ins for how a real human organ behaves.

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 – mostly plastic surgery – through what it describes as vetted non-profit 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. (Both outfits receive federal funding from the NIH and the National Cancer Institute without being federally operated.)

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 “within hours” of surgery, while it’s still living.

Asked about the donors’ privacy, he says that every sample arrives already de-identified — 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.

That norm, by the way, is a matter of days. That’s 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.)

Outer Biosciences’ system meanwhile keeps tissue alive for up to a month, says Polansky, who says it retains its “day-zero architecture and preserves its day-zero epidermal, stromal and immune-associated molecular programs.” 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’t fully indistinguishable from it.

Sunburn是Outer Biosciences额外时间所带来的最明显的例子之一。 Polansky表示，其研究人员可以在活体组织中诱导UVB损伤，然后跟踪接下来几周的压力、炎症和恢复相关反应，作为信息收集练习。他说，该团队并不是“治愈”皮肤，而是观察损伤的发生，然后观察随着时间的推移发生的生物学变化。

Perhaps anticipating pushback from the scientific community, Polansky is careful about how he frames the company’s achievements when this reporter asks questions about rival technologies. The startup’s value, he says, isn’t any one piece of what it’s doing but 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-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.

波兰斯基说，与事情开始时相比，这是一个巨大的进步。早期，该公司依靠“蛮力”方法，挖掘科学文献，并与国家癌症研究所合作，研究来自极端环境的天然化合物。该阶段在大约18个月的时间里产生了一些潜在客户，但随着人工智能的分层，该公司现在大约每六周就会产生一个新的候选人，目前有6个潜在客户处于活跃状态，并且记录了数十个额外的“点击”。

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.

It’s almost impossible to know the exact number, but it’s small. “Active ingredient” 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.

当然，这也带来了机遇。

Outer Biosciences is discovering cosmetic ingredients, not drugs, so there’s 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’s properly run studies — meaning a study done correctly in one participating country is accepted in the other 40-plus.

然后，合作伙伴将整个事情商业化。事实上，Outer Biosciences目前并没有建立自己的消费品牌，而是计划将其成品成分授权或出售给美容或制药公司，然后将其制成实际产品（精华液、面霜），并以自己的品牌将其推向市场。 Polansky表示，Outer Biosciences目前的六项先导药物中的四项看起来可能会实现商业化。

与此同时，该公司正在通过合作研究伙伴关系筹集资金，其中包括一家正在研究某些抗癌药物为何会导致严重皮疹的制药合作伙伴，以及正在测试Outer Biosciences的数据是否符合其自身产品开发和营销需求的消费美容品牌。

If Polansky is raising more money for the company currently, he won’t say. To date, the company has raised roughly $23 million, with early backers including Wing Ventures, Initialized, and Polansky’s own investing firm, Hawktail, among others. The company employs 19 people, with all but Polansky based just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Asked why he’s chosen now to talk about the company after years of near-total silence — he says he barely discussed it even with close friends — Polansky points to the data the team is beginning to amass and the confidence that has given them. “Trying to do this in private is hard,” he says, as the wait staff start flipping chairs onto tabletops, signaling it’s closing time at the bakery. “We kind of want to start working in public now,” he adds, shrugging.

Outer Biosciences并不是唯一一家追求这一想法的公司，尽管它使用真实组织而不是合成组织是独一无二的。

Vivodyne是一家位于费城的实验室培养人体器官组织的竞争对手，本月刚刚宣布，迄今为止已筹集近8000万美元，其中包括3800万美元的种子轮融资和4000万美元的A轮融资，均由Khosla Ventures领投。

其他竞争对手正在寻求各种类型的器官芯片和微生理系统用于临床前测试。

波兰斯基似乎并没有特别关注其中的任何一个——这似乎不是出于傲慢，而是因为他似乎忙得不可开交。此外，此时此刻每个人都有足够的空间。与人工智能公司训练抓取互联网不同，没有“生物互联网”可供抓取。

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. It’s also 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.

波兰斯基表示，随着时间的推移，Outer Biosciences是否会成为一家独立的商业成分企业、为其发现提供许可，或者最终围绕单一突破性化合物进行重组，他还没有决定，而且团队也不需要这样做。他说，更重要的目标是建立一个足够准确的预测模型，使公司能够发现皮肤生物学方面有希望的方向，而不必先进行每个物理实验，从而开启皮肤病学领域目前不存在的发现速度。

For now, instead, the work of turning a promising compound into a real product — the formulation, the manufacturing scale-up, the supply chain, the safety testing — is still done manually by the same scientists who discover the compounds in the first place. Building out a product-development team, with people who’ve done this kind of work before, is next on the roadmap.

“我认为让人们知道这就是我们一直在做的事情会很有趣，”他说。