Skip to main content

Longitude Prize on ALS

Accelerating a cure through the power of Artificial Intelligence

What is the Longitude Prize on ALS?

 

The £7.5 million Longitude Prize on ALS is a global challenge incentivising the use of AI-based approaches to transform drug discovery for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of Motor Neurone Disease (MND).

Delivered by Challenge Works in partnership with principal funder, the Motor Neurone Disease Association, and other key partners, this five-year prize bridges the gap between artificial intelligence and life sciences to break decades of stagnation in ALS treatment.

Accelerating ALS drug discovery

The prize is working with data holders worldwide to provide participants with access to previously unavailable data sets, as well as funding, compute, technical expertise and a range of additional support and partnership opportunities.

Learn more about the data sets

The Prize brings together the largest and most comprehensive ALS dataset of its kind, encompassing genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic, proteomic, neuroimaging, and clinical data from leading international research initiatives. Access to this rich resource will enable unprecedented analysis, accelerating the discovery of new therapeutic targets for ALS.

Learn more about the data sets

The challenge: A critical bottleneck in drug discovery

 

ALS is a devastating and currently incurable neurodegenerative disease. For decades, drug discovery has been constrained by the sheer complexity of the disease, resulting in a high failure rate in clinical trials.

The Solution: We are crowdsourcing the world’s best minds across data science, AI, and biology to identify and validate new, high-potential therapeutic targets. By harnessing AI, we can analyze complex datasets at unprecedented speeds, significantly reducing the time and cost required to bring effective treatments to patients.

Discovery Award Winners

Meet the 20 pioneering, global and multidisciplinary teams who have been named Discovery Awardees of the Longitude Prize on ALS

Learn about the teams

Our partners

The Longitude Prize on ALS is principally funded by the Motor Neurone Disease Association, a global cohort of additional funders, and is supported by numerous data partners.

Boston University, Discovery Award Winner

"The Longitude Prize on ALS gives us something rare in this field. The data, the computing power, and the partners to ask bigger questions than any one lab could ask alone. We are combining AI that learns across every layer of biology with clinicians and chemists who can act on what it finds, and that's how we believe we'll get to medicines patients can use."

ALS Precision Discovery Consortium

"The Longitude Prize on ALS gives us a unique opportunity to pursue bold, high-risk, high-reward science that traditional funding schemes rarely support. It allows us to combine cutting-edge AI, multi-omics, and perturbation modelling in ways that could fundamentally transform how therapeutic targets are discovered in ALS."

Dr. Séverine Boillée, Team Leader

DecodALS research team, Paris Brain Institute
""The ALS Prize lets us unite an unbiased AI discovery platform, deep neuro immune knowledge and a full drug development engine, a combination that could finally expose the hidden targets needed to halt ALS."

Keith Stormo

Team member
"My ALS symptoms began in 2018 and I received my official diagnosis in 2025. Being a scientist and teacher all my life is what motivated me to build a team for the Longitude Prize in ALS. It is crucial that we gain a better understanding of this terrible disease, ALS, and hopefully find new treatments."

Ravi Solanki

CEO, Prima Mente
"ALS remains one of the most urgent unsolved diseases in medicine. We're bringing the same AI scaling principles that transformed language and vision to the complexity of ALS biology and we believe this Prize gives us the perfect platform to turn that into real therapeutic leads."

Our other health prizes

Explore the other challenges we’ve run in this priority area

Learn more
Elderly woman and man enjoying a cup of tea

Longitude Prize on Dementia

The Longitude Prize on Dementia sought the development of breakthrough technology which enables people with dementia to continue living independently for longer.

Learn more
Learn more
Person in a clear visor and medical protective clothing holding up a petri dish of samples|Vanessa Carter looks at the camera

Longitude Prize on AMR

The Longitude Prize on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) was a global challenge that catalysed the creation of a rapid, point-of-care diagnostic test to slow the spread of antibiotic-resistant infections.

Learn more
Learn more

Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize

The Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize is a £6.25 million challenge prize aiming to improve outcomes for people affected by snakebite in high-burden settings.

Learn more
Explore all our prizes