Longitude Prize on ALS to award £7.5m to AI drug target discoveries for common form of MND
The Longitude Prize on ALS, a new £7.5 million global challenge prize, has launched to incentivise and reward cutting edge AI-based approaches to transform drug discovery for the treatment of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), the most common form of MND (motor neurone disease).
ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that damages the nerves in the brain and spinal cord (called motor neurones). 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.
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. In the UK, around 5,000 people are living with MND at any one time.
Although some very limited treatments exist to slow the progression of the disease for a short time, the complexity of the disease 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: “ALS is astonishingly complex which is why it has been so difficult to develop treatments that truly fight this hideous disease. Tireless fundraising in the last decade has created a wealth of data on ALS that just didn’t exist before, and we are at a turning point.
“In the last year, Tofersen, the first drug treatment to show real promise for people with the very rare inherited form of MND (affecting around two per cent of patients), shows that the disease is no longer a black box that we cannot penetrate.
“We are now on the right path for treatments for all MND patients – including those of us living with ALS. The real game changer though is the rapid advancement of AI. It means we can turn the path into a superhighway.
“Never before have we had the power to unlock the complexity of MND, and in particular ALS, and accelerate along the road to long-term treatments, and, I hope one day, a cure. The Longitude Prize on ALS makes this possible, convening the largest data set of ALS patient data of its kind ever made available and rewarding researchers to use AI to identify the most promising drug targets.”
New findings from an international survey of people living with MND/ALS and loved ones of people living with MND/ALS, in the UK, USA and Australia has found that an overwhelming majority say the world needs to pay greater attention to the disease. Just 20 per cent thought MND is considered a priority by drug developers, and only nine per cent say that it is a priority for their government.
The Longitude Prize on ALS is principally funded by the MND Association and designed and delivered by Challenge Works, supported by Nesta. 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.
Seeking innovators from across medical research, biotech, techbio, pharmaceuticals and AI, the Prize will initially reward 20 of the most promising entrants with ‘Discovery Awards’ of £100,000 each. Teams will be judged on the potential for their approach to identify and validate drug targets driving understanding of the disease and supporting onward translation into drug discovery.
The entry window is open now and remains open until 3 December 2025. The 20 successful entrants will be named in the first half of 2026.
Lucy Hawking, journalist and daughter of the MND Association’s late Patron, Professor Stephen Hawking said: “The Longitude Prize on ALS is an important step towards increasing our understanding of motor neurone disease, and specifically ALS.
“I hope the Longitude Prize will encourage the use of AI by researchers and scientists to gain new insights into this devastating condition and advance the search for treatments and a cure.
“For people living with the disease, their families, friends and carers worldwide, this would bring so much relief and joy. My father lived with MND for over 50 years, the longest known survivor with this condition and his great wish was that one day, a cure would be found. I’m proud to support the Longitude Prize and wish all entrants the very best.”
Tanya Curry, Chief Executive at the Motor Neurone Disease Association said: “Empowering some of the brightest minds across science and technology to come together, the Longitude Prize on ALS will initiate transformative change for people living with motor neurone disease.
“We are investing as a principal funder as enabling such collaborations, as well as the level of unprecedented data we’re working to unlock, marks the start of a significant milestone for drug discovery, the MND Association and wider MND community in how we understand and consequently tackle the disease.”
Challenge Works will support the top 20 most promising applications who show high potential in both their proposed methodology and team make-up, which should bring together expertise from across multiple disciplines including ALS research and computational biology.
Beyond financial reward, successful applicants will gain access to the largest and most comprehensive collections of ALS patient data of its kind ever assembled, combining multiple types of biological information and brought together specifically for the Prize. This helps address a major challenge in ALS research, where data is often fragmented and difficult to access due to differing formats and restrictions.
The Longitude Prize on ALS offers participants access to data at an unprecedented scale. The dataset will be made available via DNANexus, hosted on Amazon Web Services, provided in partnership with Project MinE, Answer ALS, New York Genome Center (NYGC), ALS Compute and the ALS Therapy Development Institute.
After the initial £100,000 ‘Discovery Awards’ have been awarded in 2026, ten teams will progress to a second stage, receiving a further £200,000 in 2027 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 the target with the strongest evidence of therapeutic potential.
The Longitude Prize on ALS is the third Longitude Prize run by Challenge Works to incentivise breakthrough solutions for some of the world’s most challenging issues. It follows the success of the Longitude Prize on AMR that announced a winner in 2024, and the Longitude Prize on Dementia that will announce a winner in 2026.
For more information and to enter the Longitude Prize on ALS, visit als.longitudeprize.org.
Earlier this year, Challenge Works joined forces with researchers from the London School of Economics (LSE) to help evaluate the five finalist technologies in the Longitude Prize on Dementia.
