The harvested skin tissue is taken to a lab where, through a series of closely guarded technologies and techniques, it’s kept alive for around a month. And not just alive — resilient. The samples still look and behave like skin, holding onto their structure as well as the resident immune cells that detect pathogens and injuries and regulate inflammation. Typically, these tissues would degrade in roughly a week.
The startup behind this advance, Outer Bio, emerged from stealth late last week. With longer-living tissue and the help of artificial intelligence tools that screen millions of compounds, Outer believes it can find new ingredients for skincare or even treatments for skin conditions. The company claims each of its compound-sample pairings generates more than 30,000 data points, and that, to date, its platform has produced north of 10 terabytes of data across more than 300 donors and 10,000 potential treatments. Outer published a preprint of its research in May.
While Outer’s work certainly has applications to drug development, its co-founder and CEO, the serial tech entrepreneur Michael Polansky, is adamant that he doesn’t want the company following the path of a traditional biotechnology firm.
