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The Longitude Prize on Dementia
22 June 2022
A new £4.1 million prize to develop life-changing technology launches September 2022
Alzheimer’s Society, Innovate UK and the Medical Research Council (MRC) have together announced that a new £4.1m Longitude Prize on Dementia to change the lives of people living with dementia will launch this September. The prize will be delivered by innovation challenge prize experts, Challenge Works.
The Longitude Prize on Dementia will incentivise assistive technologies to help people remain independent in their homes – an effective way to slow the disease’s progression.
The challenge
Innovators will be challenged to develop technologies that learn about the lives of people with early-stage dementia, employing novel and emerging technologies to bridge cognitive gaps that develop as their condition progresses.
The £4.1m Longitude Prize on Dementia will award £3.1 million in seed funding and grants to the most promising innovators, with a £1 million prize awarded to the winner in early 2026.
The support
In addition, wider support has been funded to provide innovators with crucial insight and expertise, facilitating whatever they need to bring their ideas to life – like access to data, collaborations with people living with dementia and dementia organisations in the UK and around the world, advice on product design, user experience and business mentoring.
Alzheimer’s Society
Spotlighting why new assistive technologies for people living with dementia are a missing piece of the innovation puzzle, Kate Lee, CEO of Alzheimer’s Society explained,
“Current technologies supporting dementia care focus on monitoring people and alerting their carers but there are real opportunities for innovation which will support people to live joyfully and independently.
The Longitude Prize on Dementia will deliver technologies that become an extension of the individual’s working ‘brain’ and memory in a way that is specific to their needs – enabling them to continue living at home and doing the things they love for as long as possible.”
Innovate UK
Announcing the challenge prize and explaining its importance and urgency, Indro Mukerjee, CEO of Innovate UK said,
“Innovate UK is strongly committed to supporting businesses to innovate solutions for many healthy ageing challenges.
Dementia is one of those big challenges, and in the UK alone 210,000 people will develop dementia this year. Now is the time to act.”
Medical Research Council
Meanwhile, the MRC’s Interim Executive Chair, Professor John Iredale, said,
“With cases on course to triple by 2050, the dementias are a major research priority for the MRC.
Our aim is to transform our understanding of the causes and progression of dementia so we can find better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent it.”
The Longitude Prize
The Longitude Prize on Dementia is the second modern Longitude Prize delivered by Challenge Works, with the Longitude Prize on AMR launched in 2014 calling on innovators to develop novel diagnostic tests to tackle the rise of antimicrobial resistance, also known as superbugs.
Since 2012, Challenge Works has run more than 80 prizes, in global health, climate change and pollution, consumer services and frontier technologies. To date, it has distributed £84 million in funding and engaged with 12,000 innovators.
Challenge Works
Welcoming the announcement of the new Longitude Prize to incentivise innovators from diverse disciplines to focus on developing solutions for people living with dementia, Tris Dyson, Managing Director, Challenge Works said,
“Challenge prizes incentivise the development of breakthrough technologies to solve some of the most intractable problems of our time.
By levelling the playing field for innovators, through an open competition, with seed funding and expert capacity building support, they enable a diversity of approaches to a problem to progress through the competition, with the best solution winning the top prize only after it has proven its effectiveness.
We are really excited about applying this approach to finding innovative solutions to the day-to-day problems experienced by people living with dementia.”