The Foundation was proud to attend the launch of the Longitude Prize on ALS, held in London on June 25th. The event marked a significant milestone in the global effort to accelerate treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of motor neurone disease (MND). Among the speakers was the Managing Director of Challenge Works, who gave a powerful and personal testimony, having been diagnosed with ALS himself in 2023. His remarks underscored the urgent need for innovation and collaboration in tackling this devastating condition.
About Longitude Prize on ALS
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.
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.
