Health

Tackling the biggest health issues of our time

Meaningful innovation for Health

At Challenge Works, our Health priority is driven by the conviction that transformative health innovations must empower people, promote equity, and put lived experience at the very center of solution design. From tackling global health crises like antimicrobial resistance to pioneering accessible surgical training and AI-driven tools for neurological conditions like dementia and ALS, market incentives and traditional research often fall short. We bridge these critical gaps by co-designing challenge prizes that unite global, cross-sector innovators. By incentivising human-centered technology, we accelerate groundbreaking diagnostics, therapies, and technologies to ensure that life-changing health breakthroughs reach the individuals and communities who need them most.

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Take a look at some of the prizes we’ve run in this area

Longitude Prize on ALS

The £7.5 million (~$10 million) Longitude Prize on ALS incentivises the use of AI-based approaches to transform drug discovery for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of motor neurone disease (MND).

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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.

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An Indian surgeon in teal scrubs and a patterned headscarf is securing a face mask in a white corridor|An Indian man wearing a dark suit and a white shirt

Global Surgical Training Challenge

The Global Surgical Training Challenge aimed to make simulation-based training accessible through low-cost, open-source training modules.

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Our impact

£4.4 million deployed for AI-driven dementia care

Funded by Alzheimer’s Society and Innovate UK, the Longitude Prize on Dementia awarded £1.5 million across five international finalist teams (leading to a £1 million grand prize) and £80,000 to each of the 24 semi-finalists to develop AI-enabled technologies co-created with people living with dementia to enable them to stay in their home for longer.

45-minute point-of-care bacterial diagnosis and antibiotic susceptibility test

The £8 million Longitude Prize on AMR awarded winner Sysmex Astrego for a rapid diagnostic test that identifies bacterial infections in 15 minutes and selects the right antibiotic in 45 minutes—slashing the traditional 2-to-3-day lab waiting time to transform global antibiotic stewardship.

10,000+ patient multi-omic dataset unlocked for drug discovery

The £7.5 million Longitude Prize on ALS has brought together and harmonised whole-genome and clinical data from over 9,600 ALS cases and 3,600 controls into a single platform, enabling global AI researchers to discover and validate new therapeutic targets for motor neurone disease.

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John T. O'Brien, University of Cambridge

Longitude Prize on Dementia

"It has been a great pleasure working with Challenge Works on the Longitude Prize on Dementia. Their extensive experience has made the whole process, from inviting applications through to the initial selection of first stage awardees, seamless and efficient and makes it a pleasure to Chair the judging panel."

Catherine Mohr, President, Intuitive Foundation

Global Surgical Training Challenge

"We chose to work with Challenge Works because of their deep experience in running these big multinational prizes in complex medical areas. The combination of being able to help us put an international judging panel together and being able to coordinate across their deep experience in how prizes should be structured were key reasons why we chose to work with Challenge Works, and it's been an excellent partnership."

Discovery Award Winner, Boston University

Longitude Prize on ALS

"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."