Michael Polansky doesn’t fit the biotech founder mold. He spent three years at Bridgewater Associates, worked alongside Sean Parker for a decade, and now splits his time between running Haus Labs operations with Lady Gaga and leading a startup that’s solved a problem most people didn’t know existed.
Outer Biosciences, co-founded in 2022 with Kyung-Jin Jang, Chris Hinojosa, and Stanley King, has kept living human tissue alive outside the body for over a month. That’s not a typo. Current proxies — animal models, simplified cell cultures, lab-grown organoids — are notoriously poor stand-ins for real human organs. The company grew out of a frustration Polansky absorbed during his years in cancer immunotherapy: software iterates fast because you can test it immediately. Biology crawls because you can’t ethically run experiments on people.
Polansky met Lady Gaga in late 2019 at one of Sean Parker’s birthday parties, after her mother Cynthia spent months trying to set them up. “I was like, I think you’re making fun of me,” he recalls. Now they run a three-747 touring operation together and collaborate professionally — Gaga sits on Outer’s board, and Outer’s chief scientist sits on Haus Labs’ advisory board. Polansky describes the tour as “a 200-person startup that travels around the world every day.”
The tissue survival breakthrough matters beyond the celebrity angle. If human tissue can stay viable for weeks instead of days, drug testing and disease modeling get dramatically more reliable. That’s the gap between simulated biology and actual biology — and it’s the same gap that’s kept cancer immunotherapy and countless other fields moving slower than software. Polansky’s team has apparently closed some of it, quietly, without the usual biotech fanfare.
