Longitude Prize on ALS awards £2 million to 20 international teams pursuing treatments
The Longitude Prize on ALS is awarding £2 million to 20 of the world’s most promising multidisciplinary teams of innovators using AI to find new drug targets for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) – the most common form of MND (motor neurone disease).
Judged by an esteemed independent panel of global experts, the Longitude Prize on ALS is a £7.5 million global challenge prize that is incentivising and rewarding cutting edge AI-based approaches to transform drug discovery to treat ALS. Following a global call to action in June 2025, almost 100 teams representing the world’s leading universities, technology giants, advanced medical research organisations and AI pioneers entered the prize.
Today, 20 of the most promising entrants have received “Discovery Awards” of £100,000 each, based on their potential to use AI to identify and validate drug targets. Identifying drug targets will drive understanding of the disease and support future drug discovery.
The successful awardees include King’s College London (UK) in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline and Bielefeld University (Germany), Aperture Therapeutics (USA) in partnership with Harvard Medical School and Tufts University; Paris Brain Institute (France) in partnership with Simmunome (Canada) and Servier (France); ALS Therapy Development Institute (USA) in partnership with Google Cloud, Translational Neurodegeneration; German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases; Rostock/Greifswald (Germany) in partnership with Gladstone Institutes (USA); University College London (UK); Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium); the University of Edinburgh (UK); the National University of Singapore (Singapore) and Stockholm University (Sweden) and The University of Pennsylvania (USA).
The 20 teams now have access to the largest and most comprehensive ALS patient dataset of its kind, combining multiple types of biological information which have not been available in one place previously – including the genomic sequences of 9,000 ALS patients and epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics[1] data for over 2,000 cases.
During this first round of the prize, the teams will draw on the diverse expertise within each team to identify the most promising drug targets with the help of AI.
In 2027, 10 of the teams will progress to a second stage, receiving a further £200,000 to build the evidence base for their proposed therapeutic targets in silico and in the lab. In 2028, five teams will then receive £500,000 to undertake validation of the highest potential identified targets in the wet lab.
The winning team will be announced in early 2031 and will be awarded £1 million for identifying and validating the target with the strongest evidence of therapeutic potential.
The Longitude Prize on ALS is principally funded by the MND Association and designed and delivered by Challenge Works, home of the Longitude Prize. Additional funders include Nesta, the Alan Davidson Foundation, My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, LifeArc, FightMND, The 10,000 Brains Project, Answer ALS and The Packard Center at Johns Hopkins.
ALS is a fatal progressive neurodegenerative disease that damages the nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Signals from the brain stop reaching muscles, leading to severe muscle degeneration. Eventually this affects the muscles that are used to swallow food and drink, and those used to breathe.
According to the MND Association there is a one in 300 chance that a person will develop MND in their lifetime and it can affect adults of any age – around 90 per cent of cases will have ALS. Worldwide, there are around a third of a million people living with MND at any one time, with the prevalence predicted to increase 25 per cent by 2040.
Although some very limited treatments exist to slow the progression of the disease for a short time, its complexity means that there are no long-term treatments and no cure. For the first time, however, advances in AI mean innovators now have the opportunity to outpace the disease by unlocking vast quantities of patient data that have been generated in the last decade.
Tris Dyson, Managing Director at Challenge Works who was diagnosed with ALS in 2023 said: “10 months on from launch, we are celebrating 20 highly collaborative and creative consortiums who have teamed up with a shared goal in mind – to find a treatment for ALS.
“I was confident that the time was right to launch the Longitude Prize on ALS, given huge advances in AI. However, I didn’t quite realise just how impressive a line-up of researchers and innovators it would attract. Beating ALS requires the boldest and brightest innovators – and that’s what we have found.”
Dr Yentli Soto Albrecht (32), member of the University of Pennsylvania team who has a 95 per cent lifetime chance of developing ALS or frontotemporal dementia, said: “I know that, if nothing changes, I will become one of the one in 300 people who will develop ALS in their lifetime. Having watched what this disease took from my father, I not only grieved his loss but also faced the reality of what lay ahead for me. My world crumbled. I built another, around my MD-PhD and the work it made possible.
“I am committed to finding a treatment for ALS before the disease takes me too, a door the Longitude Prize on ALS has opened. There’s a real chance that, across these 20 teams, we discover the perfect drug target – and what an honour it is to play a part in this fight.”
Tanya Curry, Chief Executive of the MND Association, said: “Our vision is a world free from MND and this can be achieved through funding leading researchers to chase down new treatments. These 20 teams of innovators and their work can provide more understanding of this condition and potentially, one day, a cure. MND is a devastating disease, but every step forward in research brings hope. We are delighted to support the work that lies ahead in our role as principal funder.”
