The Longitude Prize on ALS, a new £7.5 million global challenge prize, aims to encourage 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).
Initially, it will award £100,000 each to 20 teams in 2026 and access to the largest ALS patient dataset of its kind: one team will then go on to win £1 million.
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 1 in 300 chance that a person will develop MND in their lifetime and it can affect adults of any age – around 90% 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 can unlock vast quantities of patient data generated in the last decade.
Inviting 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 until 3 December 2025, with the successful entrants announced in the new year.
The Prize 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.
Challenge Works will support the top 20 most promising applications who show high potential in both their proposed methodology and team make-up, bringing 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.
It also 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, 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 is to 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, visit als.longitudeprize.org
