“Over the last 18 months we have developed an AI model that leads to significant acceleration and improvement of editing oligonucleotides in drug discovery,” said Daniel A. de Boer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ProQR. “We welcome the distinguished members of our AI advisory board who are helping us to maximize the impact of AI-enabled drug discovery for patients.”

De Boer continued, “We’re pleased to have announced the partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks, providing us access to their state-of-the-art autonomous lab enabling high throughput data generation to further scale up our AI-enabled drug discovery.”

Strategic Partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks

ProQR’s partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks provides ProQR access to Ginkgo’s 50+ instrument autonomous lab, Nebula. Ginkgo’s autonomous lab removes a main bottleneck in AI-enabled drug discovery by increasing data generation throughput and speed. This capability is expected to increase the scale and speed of experimental data generation, enabling more efficient discovery timelines and improving the ability of ProQR’s discovery AI models to predict drug candidates. Ginkgo made a strategic equity investment in ProQR in connection with the partnership.

AI-enabled Programs

ProQR expects to advance its first programs generated using its AI-enabled discovery approach into the clinic, with a clinical trial application (CTA) anticipated in mid-2026 and initial clinical data anticipated by year-end 2026. The company will provide further details on its AI-enabled drug discovery, the AI-generated Development Candidates and the plans for clinical trials thereof at its Investor and Analyst event later today (details below).

AI Advisory Board

ProQR has established an AI Advisory Board comprising leaders from the AI and techbio fields to support the development of the Company’s AI strategy for Axiomer. The Advisory Board will provide guidance on how ProQR applies AI in its discovery efforts, including best practices, emerging approaches, and insights from the field helping to accelerate drug discovery and optimization of Axiomer editing oligonucleotides.

Members of the ProQR AI Advisory Board include:

• Eric Durand, PhD, Chief Data Science Officer, Owkin

• David Ruau, PhD, Head of BD EMEA, Healthcare & Life Sciences, NVIDIA

• Thomas Wolf, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face

• Gerard van Westen, Full Professor AI and Medicinal Chemistry at Leiden University

• Romain Lacombe, Venture Partner, HCVC

• Imran Haque, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, Kimia Therapeutics

About Axiomer™

ProQR is pioneering a next-generation RNA base editing technology called Axiomer™, which could potentially yield a new class of medicines for diverse types of diseases. Axiomer™ “Editing Oligonucleotides”, or EONs, mediate single nucleotide changes to RNA in a highly specific and targeted way using molecular machinery that is present in human cells called ADAR (Adenosine Deaminase Acting on RNA). Axiomer™ EONs are designed to recruit and direct endogenously expressed ADARs to change an Adenosine (A) to an Inosine (I) in the RNA – an Inosine is translated as a Guanosine (G) – correcting an RNA with a disease-causing mutation back to a normal (wild type) RNA, modulating protein expression, or altering a protein so that it will have a new function that helps prevent or treat disease.

About ProQR

ProQR Therapeutics is dedicated to changing lives through the creation of transformative RNA therapies. ProQR is pioneering a next-generation RNA technology called Axiomer™, which uses a cell’s own editing machinery called ADAR to make specific single nucleotide edits in RNA to reverse a mutation or modulate protein expression and could potentially yield a new class of medicines for both rare and prevalent diseases with unmet need. Based on our unique proprietary RNA repair platform technologies we are growing our pipeline with patients and loved ones in mind.

Learn more about ProQR at www.proqr.com.