Longitude Prize on ALS
Grant Amount
£1.5m
Grant Duration
5 years from 2025
The Alan Davidson Foundation is proud to have committed £1.5 million in funding over the next five years to support the Longitude Prize on ALS. From the outset, we have been enthusiastic about contributing to a project so closely aligned with Alan’s values, championing innovation, fostering multidisciplinary collaboration, and leveraging technology to drive meaningful change for the greater good.
About the prize
The Longitude Prize on ALS, is a new £7.5 million global challenge prize, that has been 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 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 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 was diagnosed with ALS in 2023.
ALS is astonishingly complex which is why it has been so difficult to develop treatments that truly fight this hideous disease. Tireless fundraising in thae 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 2% 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.”
Facts and figures
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 (85%) say the world needs to pay greater attention to the disease. Just 20% thought MND is considered a priority by drug developers, and only 9% say that it is a priority for their government.
85% say that technology companies and research universities should work together more closely to identify treatments for MND, with 74% saying they would like to see technology companies put AI to good use and apply it to finding a treatment.
3 in 10 (29%) people believe that long term treatments or a cure will be available for MND within a decade, with a further 18% believing it is possible by 2045. 74% of respondents said they would be happy for their, or their loved one’s, biological data to be shared with scientists and researchers to potentially help in new drug developments and treatments for MND.
How to win the Longitude Prize on ALS
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, Fight MND, 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 from today and remains open until 3 December 2025. The 20 successful entrants will be named in the first half of 2026.
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 MineE, Answer ALS, New York Genome Center (NYGC), ALS Compute and the ALS Therapy Development Institute.
