Outer Bio has emerged from stealth with Yuna, an ex vivo platform designed to keep full-thickness human skin alive and measurable for four weeks—creating a longer, more biologically relevant window for studying skin health and discovering cosmetic actives.
- About the company: Outer Bio is a biotechnology company focused on closing the gap between laboratory testing and what actually works in human skin. Its platform enables researchers to study compounds directly in living human skin tissue for extended periods, addressing a longstanding limitation of ex vivo models. The company aims to accelerate the discovery of effective, safe skin-care actives by combining human tissue research with engineering, data and AI, rather than relying solely on cell lines, animal models or computational predictions.
- Yuna's research trajectory: Outer Bio’s trajectory has centered on building a more human-relevant foundation for skin-care discovery, culminating in the launch of Yuna 1.0 in August 2026. The company developed an ex vivo platform capable of keeping full-thickness human skin viable and measurable for four weeks, compared with the few days to roughly one week typical of standard models. Yuna now serves as the foundation for Outer Bio’s broader strategy, combining long-duration human tissue, diverse donor samples, environmental stress testing, clinical-compatible measurements, multi-omic data and AI to identify biological mechanisms and develop new bioactives. The company is now moving from platform development toward scaling data generation, expanding the biology it can model and using Yuna to drive its own compound discovery while making the platform available selectively to research and product-development partners.
The key distinction is that Yuna uses actual donated human skin rather than reconstructed skin or isolated cells. The platform preserves the skin’s epidermis, dermis, multiple resident cell types and immune-associated molecular programs, allowing researchers to observe biological responses over time while retaining the tissue’s native architecture.
That four-week window is significant because conventional ex vivo skin models can be difficult to maintain long enough to study slower biological processes. Yuna is designed to extend the period in which researchers can measure those processes, opening up longer-term investigations into aging, pigmentation, wound healing, inflammation and skin-barrier function.
Outer Bio is also combining the tissue platform with automated experimentation and machine learning. Its models are trained on data generated from its own human-skin samples rather than relying solely on public datasets, with the company using the system to identify biological targets and screen large numbers of compounds before validating promising candidates experimentally.
Another differentiator is the scale and diversity of the underlying tissue dataset. Outer Bio says Yuna incorporates samples from hundreds of individuals spanning different ages, genders, skin types and Fitzpatrick classifications, potentially allowing researchers to investigate how biological responses vary across human populations rather than relying on a narrow donor pool.
For the beauty industry, the significance is about changing where new ingredient discovery begins. Outer Bio is positioning Yuna as a platform for identifying previously unknown mechanisms and molecules in living human skin, rather than primarily optimizing familiar cosmetic actives or delivery systems. The company says its objective is to discover new mechanisms of action and the compounds that drive them.
In effect, Yuna brings three capabilities together—living human tissue, automated screening and predictive machine learning—in an effort to shorten the path from biological discovery to new skin-care actives. That could give ingredient developers a more human-relevant environment for deciding which molecules are worth advancing before moving into human studies.
