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Pop quiz: What is the human body’s largest organ? That’s chronically inflamed for 20-25% of us? That we collectively spend more than $100 billion on every single year?
If you guessed skin, you are right on the money.
Skin has always been one of biology's hardest engineering problems. Unlike many organs, skin is constantly regenerating, contains a multitude of interacting cell types, and is vulnerable to environmental exposures.
Tracking changes to the skin takes weeks. However, when taken out of the body, human skin dies in 3-7 days.
Today, I’m delighted to announce Wing’s investment in Outer Bio, the company changing the skin health paradigm. Outer’s platform, Yuna, maintains living, full-thickness human skin—with its native architecture and immune function—for four weeks or more while collecting rich longitudinal multi-omic measurements. Yuna has already generated over 10 terabytes of proprietary data across more than 300 donors and 10,000 treatments. Outer’s virtual screening library already spans 5.9 million compounds across 11 databases.
Outer’s combination of a novel skin platform, data generation, and machine learning-guided discovery takes the guesswork out of finding new bioactives that dramatically improve skin health.
I’d argue this level of technical expertise and complexity could only have been accomplished by the exact team I have had the extreme pleasure of working closely with. Led by CEO and Co-founder Michael Polansky, the team—Kyung-Jin (KJ) Jang, Chris Hinojosa, Stanley King, and James Coon—are experienced, Harvard-trained biotech veterans responsible for creating the first commercially available organs-on-chips.
We are excited to partner with Outer and announce our lead investment in Outer Bio!
You can read more about the Outer platform in this preprint posted to bioRxiv.
