On August 24, 2026, skin bioactive discovery company Outer Bio announced the release of Yuna, an ex vivo human-skin platform that keeps skin samples alive and measurable for over four weeks. The company claims that the platform provides a new way to generate reproducible, clinically relevant human-skin data at longer durations.
According to the company’s press release, Yuna holds full-thickness human skin samples that keep the epidermis, dermis, multiple cell types and immune function alive for four or more weeks. Further, each sample generates more than 30,000 data points for bioactive ingredient discovery.
“Skincare has never lacked demand or ambition,” said co-founder and chief executive officer Michael Polansky. “It has lacked the ability to study compounds and mechanisms in living human skin over a biologically relevant timeframe. Most experimental platforms rely on reconstructed skin or cell monolayers. those models can tell you whether a compound is toxic; they can’t tell you whether it works, because they lack the complexity and architecture of the real organ. We built Yuna to close that gap.”
In addition to launching the platform, Outer Bio published research on Yuna’s ability to reproduce three distinct skin biologies during a four-week window. Further, the platform has been validated on a broad set of benchmark bioactive and therapeutic agents across anti-aging, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and skin-protective applications.
The company also stated that it is working on a discovery engine to combine machine learning with its experimental design.
“AI for biology has a fundamental data problem,” Polansky added. “AI models are improving far faster than the experiments that validate and train them. The bottleneck isn’t intelligence — it’s a scalable source of clinically valid data, and that data has to be grown, not computed. Yuna is built to generate it.”
