Longitude Prize on ALS awards £2 million to teams using AI to identify new drug targets

The Longitude Prize on ALS, which we co-fund, is a global challenge prize 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. 

Today, it has announced it will award £2 million to 20 of the world’s most promising multidisciplinary teams doing exactly that.

Following a global call to action last summer, which attracted almost 100 applications, 20 teams have been selected as Discovery Award winners, each receiving £100,000. The successful teams span more than 70 organisations across 12 countries, including King’s College London, the Paris Brain Institute, GlaxoSmithKline, MIT, Harvard Medical School and the University of Sydney.

In addition to funding, the teams will gain access to the largest and most comprehensive ALS patient datasets of its kind. This combines multiple types of biological information not previously available in one place, including the genomic sequences of 9,000 ALS patients, as well as epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics data for over 2,000 cases. Teams will use this data and AI to identify the most promising drug targets, driving our understanding of the disease and supporting future drug discovery.

The Prize will continue to narrow the field over the coming years. In 2027, 10 teams will progress to the next stage, each receiving a further £200,000 to build the evidence base for their targets. In 2028, five teams will be awarded £500,000 for wet lab validation, before a final winning team receives £1 million in early 2031.

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...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 the inherited form of ALS, added: “Having watched what this cruel disease took from my father, who died in 2024, I am committed to finding a treatment for ALS. The Longitude Prize on ALS has opened that door, and there’s now a real chance that, across these 20 teams, we will come up with an answer.”

The Prize is principally funded by the MND Association and designed and delivered by Challenge Works, supported by Nesta, alongside additional global funders, including My Name’5 Doddie Foundation.

For more information and to view the full list of winning teams, visit als.longitudeprize.org