Outer Biosciences, a San Francisco-area startup, is keeping surgically discarded human skin alive outside the body for more than a month and training AI models on the living tissue, TechCrunch reported.
Co-founded in 2022 by CEO Michael Polansky, chief scientist Kyung-Jin Jang, CTO Chris Hinojosa and chief business officer Stanley King, the company sources skin that would otherwise be thrown away, mostly from plastic surgery, through NIH-funded biobanks including the National Disease Research Interchange and the Cooperative Human Tissue Network. Polansky says the tissue arrives under institutional review board oversight with documented donor consent.
The rationale is that standard research proxies, including animal models, simplified cell cultures and organoids, are poor stand-ins for real human organs, while experiments directly on people raise ethical barriers. Keeping tissue alive makes it possible to study responses over time and to generate training data that reflects living biology rather than frozen samples.
The approach also explains the company’s name: instead of engineering synthetic organs, it works from the outside in, using donated human material as the substrate for machine learning. The company has so far operated quietly, spending about two years building its tissue pipeline and handling the required protocols.
If living-tissue AI can predict how skin reacts to drugs, ingredients or disease, the same method could extend to other organs and give pharmaceutical developers a more faithful test bed.
