ProQR Therapeutics N.V. (NASDAQ: PRQR) announced a partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks and the establishment of an AI Advisory Board to support its Axiomer RNA editing technology platform. The collaboration aims to accelerate drug discovery through artificial intelligence.

The partnership provides ProQR access to Ginkgo's autonomous laboratory facility called Nebula, which contains more than 50 instruments. This facility is designed to increase data generation throughput and speed for AI-enabled drug discovery. Ginkgo made a strategic equity investment in ProQR as part of the partnership agreement.

ProQR expects to file a clinical trial application for its first AI-discovered development candidate in mid-2026, with initial clinical data anticipated by the end of 2026. The company stated it has developed an AI model over the past 18 months to accelerate the discovery of editing oligonucleotides.

The newly formed AI Advisory Board includes six members from industry and academia: Eric Durand from Owkin, David Ruau from NVIDIA, Thomas Wolf from Hugging Face, Gerard van Westen from Leiden University, Romain Lacombe from HCVC, and Imran Haque from Kimia Therapeutics.

"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.

ProQR's Axiomer technology uses cellular machinery called ADAR to make specific RNA edits that can correct disease-causing mutations or modify protein expression. The company hosted a virtual investor and analyst event to discuss these developments and provide updates on its pipeline.

The information is based on a company press release statement.