Community stories and news

In this personal interview, we speak to ProQR’s Chief Corporate Development Officer & General Counsel, René Beukema on his return to ProQR.

In September 2021 ProQR announced a global licensing and research collaboration with Lilly. The partnership focuses on developing potential medicines using our Axiomer RNA editing platform technology. Strategic collaborations like this can help to drive the advancement of an early-stage technology, like Axiomer, closer to the clinic.

This month several ProQRians will attend the Oligonucleotide and Peptide Therapeutics Conference (TIDES Europe) 2022 to highlight our Axiomer® RNA-editing platform technology.

Announced today (August 11, 2022), ProQR will focus exclusively on the development of the Axiomer® RNA editing technology platform across multiple therapeutic areas. This comes following feedback from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) related to ProQR’s sepofarsen for Leber Congenital Amaurosis type 10 (LCA10).

At ProQR we strive to create an inclusive culture where everyone is valued for who they are and individual differences and contributions are recognized and appreciated. Therefore, we decided for this Pride Month June 2022, to visually demonstrate our support and acknowledgment of the LGBTQ+ community by changing our logo to incorporate the pride rainbow flag.

ProQR has announced the completion of an in-depth strategic review designed to deliver on our commitment to advance RNA therapies for diseases with high unmet need. We are also sharing additional analyses of the sepofarsen Illuminate trial.

On behalf of all ProQRians, happy Rare Disease Day 2022. Both within ProQR and outside, we join the community in raising awareness and trying to generate change for people worldwide living with a rare disease, their families, and supporters.

In top-line analyses, the Illuminate study did not meet its primary endpoint of Best Corrected Visual Acuity (BCVA) and secondary endpoints. No benefit was observed in either sepofarsen treatment arm versus the sham treated control arm.

Even in lockdown we have been working hard as ProQRians to stay connected to the inherited retinal disease community. Rare Disease Day is a unique awareness day due to its global reach and significance.

He is one of the founders of ProQR, but even long before that Gerard Platenburg was involved in the development of RNA therapies. Even so, after decades of working on them he still gets enthusiastic when talking about RNA.

There are currently around 160 people working at ProQR, but that wasn’t always the case. When Hee Lam Chan joined in 2013, she was only employee number six. As a result, she has seen the company grow and develop.

The potential of this new technology for RNA therapeutics is immense, says Bart Klein, who was at the forefront of the Axiomer® technology development. ProQR’s Sr. Vice President Innovation makes his point about the promise of Axiomer® technology: “This opens up a whole new way of designing medicines for genetic diseases that were previously ‘out of reach’ for existing technologies.”