Polansky's lab keeps skin alive — then trains AI on it

Michael Polansky has been quietly building a company that takes living human skin out of the body and keeps it alive for weeks. The tissue stays functional — cells metabolize, immune cells respond — and the platform lets researchers test skincare compounds on it instead of animals or petri dishes. Now the company is going public about the work.

Polansky runs the lab from Los Angeles. He's a former top deputy to Sean Parker and is publicly known as Lady Gaga's partner, but the startup itself is separate from those circles. The approach is straightforward: grow living skin, keep it alive, feed it chemicals, watch how it reacts. That's the data the AI model is built on. The startup is only now telling the world it exists.

Why this matters for us: living tissue is expensive and hard to maintain, so whoever controls the platform controls a bottleneck for anyone — including community clinics and indie formulators — who wants to test products on real skin without the cruelty or the guesswork.