Michael Polansky is training an AI model on skin that’s still alive
- ID
- 16671
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 22 Aug 2026, 9:31 AM
- Fetched
- 22 Aug 2026, 9:43 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/21/michael-polansky-is-training-an-ai-model-on-skin-thats-still-alive/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 3.5
- Created
- 22 Aug 2026, 9:43 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- ai_ml_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
Michael Polansky, founder of Outer Biosciences (and Lady Gaga's partner), has spent years developing methods to keep living human skin tissue alive outside the body for over a month, and is training AI models on that living tissue data. The startup has operated largely in stealth, and the article profiles Polansky's path from Harvard applied math to Bridgewater Associates to Founders Fund before founding the biotech AI company.
Why it matters
For AI/ML builders, the notable technical claim is keeping living human tissue viable ex-vivo for 30+ days and using it as a training data source for AI models — a data pipeline approach that diverges from standard clinical or synthetic datasets. However, the article is mostly a founder profile with no technical detail on the model architecture, dataset size, or validation results, so there is little actionable takeaway for builders outside biotech. It may be worth tracking Outer Biosciences if you work at the AI-biology intersection or are exploring novel biological data acquisition strategies.
Discussion angle
What does it mean for AI model quality when training data comes from living tissue rather than static clinical datasets — and what are the data engineering and regulatory implications if this approach scales?