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).
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.
Twenty 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)
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 proteomics1 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, ten 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.
