ProQR names Chris Hart as Chief Data and AI Officer, adds Thomas Wolf to board

ProQR Therapeutics N.V. announced on September 23, 2026 that Chris Hart, PhD, will join as Chief Data and AI Officer and that Thomas Wolf, PhD, will join the company's Board of Directors as a strategic AI advisor. The appointments support ProQR's strategy to scale AI across the discovery and development of medicines using its Axiomer RNA editing platform and pipeline.¹

Hart most recently served as Vice President of Data Science and AI/ML in the Genetic Medicines team at Eli Lilly and Company, and was previously founding CEO of Creyon Bio, where he applied AI and machine learning to oligonucleotide drug discovery; before that he spent seven years at Ionis Pharmaceuticals, where he built and led the company's functional genomics group.¹ As Chief Data and AI Officer, Hart will lead ProQR's AI strategy and its execution across drug discovery and development.¹

Wolf is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform that Nvidia recently agreed to acquire for $12.9B.¹ In his role, Wolf will advise ProQR's Board on technology strategy and scaling AI across the Axiomer platform.¹

On the pipeline side, ProQR said its AI-enabled discovery process yielded AX-0811, a candidate that reached approximately 60% editing efficiency in humanized models, around six-fold higher than the prior generation AX-0810, with improved stability.¹ The company said this result came with reduced discovery timelines, cut from what used to take three years down to approximately three months.¹

Looking ahead, ProQR's pipeline is expected to generate up to 5 clinical data readouts over the coming 12 months across four development programs.¹ AX-0811 is the first program discovered through this AI-enabled process to enter clinical testing, and target engagement data from its first two cohorts is expected in early January 2027.¹ Other programs moving toward the clinic include AX-0422 for MPS I Hurler syndrome and AX-2911 for PNPLA3-associated MASH.¹