New Longitude Prize to award £7.5m to teams using AI to identify therapeutic targets for ALS – the most common form of motor neurone disease.
The burden of neurodegenerative disease is global, growing and complex; as populations age and life expectancy extends, conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS are becoming both more prevalent and more economically significant. The need to shift from palliative management to disease-modifying interventions is urgent – and in the case of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), where progression is swift and options few, the call to innovate has become pressing.
Now a new £7.5 million global challenge is aiming to do just that. The Longitude Prize on ALS, launched today by Challenge Works and principally funded by the UK’s Motor Neurone Disease Association, will reward AI-led approaches that can identify and validate new drug targets for ALS. With twenty £100,000 Discovery Awards to be made in 2026, and a final £1 million prize to be awarded in 2031, the competition seeks to catalyze multidisciplinary efforts to tackle a disease that continues to elude therapeutic progress.
Longevity.Technology: The launch of the Longitude Prize on ALS marks more than a well-funded attempt to tackle a devastating disease – it signals a broader shift in how we harness AI to interrogate biological complexity at scale. Drug discovery has long been hindered by the tyranny of fragmented data and the glacial pace of hypothesis-led trials; by convening a vast, integrated ALS dataset and throwing open the doors to AI-led analysis, this Prize does more than incentivize innovation – it invites a reimagining of how we approach diseases that have, until now, resolutely resisted therapeutic progress. That it does so with the backing of patients, whose willingness to share their data speaks volumes about both desperation and hope, highlights the urgency – and the stakes.
There is something quietly radical in the design of this Prize – not simply its milestone funding model, which sensibly rewards rigor over rhetoric, but its insistence on multidisciplinary teams and translational pathways. Neuroscience meets machine learning meets wet-lab validation, all underpinned by a competitive framework that aims to outpace a disease best known for racing ahead of science. One might argue that 2031 is a long time to wait for a winner – but in longevity terms, that’s practically overnight. If this approach yields viable targets for ALS, there will be immediate interest in replicating it across other neurodegenerative frontiers – and if it doesn’t, the sheer volume of data mined and the methodologies stress-tested may yet serve the wider field. Either way, the real prize may be the precedent.
From patient data to discovery pathway
ALS affects the nerve cells that control muscle movement, gradually robbing individuals of the ability to walk, speak and ultimately breathe. It is the most common form of motor neurone disease, accounting for around 90% of cases. Life expectancy from diagnosis is typically just two to five years, and while some treatments exist that may slow progression modestly, there are no therapies that halt or reverse the disease course.
Despite numerous clinical trials – often more, in fact, than other neurodegenerative conditions – ALS continues to defy conventional drug discovery methods. The reasons are multifaceted: a historically narrow reliance on specific genetic models, difficulties in recruiting and stratifying patients, and a tendency for late-stage diagnosis, by which point significant neuronal loss has already occurred.
The Prize seeks to change this trajectory by leveraging one of the most powerful tools in current biomedicine: data. Participating teams will be granted access to what is described as the largest and most comprehensive ALS dataset ever assembled – a collection drawn from initiatives such as Answer ALS, Project MinE and the ALS Therapy Development Institute, harmonized and hosted on a DNANexus platform via AWS.
As Tris Dyson, Managing Director at Challenge Works and himself diagnosed with ALS in 2023, remarked: “ALS is astonishingly complex which is why it has been so difficult to develop treatments that truly fight this hideous disease. Tireless fundraising in the 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… shows that the disease is no longer a black box… The real game changer though is the rapid advancement of AI. It means we can turn the path into a superhighway.”
A competition model rooted in collaboration
The structure of the Longitude Prize reflects a growing preference for staged, de-risked innovation in early-stage biotech – an approach well suited to diseases with uncertain mechanistic underpinnings. After the initial Discovery Awards in 2026, selected teams will progress through successive funding rounds of £200,000 and £500,000, culminating in a final validation phase. Importantly, teams must demonstrate not only AI competence but also translational potential – in silico hypotheses must rightly give way to biological proof.
Supporters of the Prize include an array of research organizations and charities spanning the UK, US and Australia, among them Johns Hopkins’ Packard Center, My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, FightMND and LifeArc. The intention is to galvanize new collaborations across computational biology, ALS research and therapeutic development – with patient data and patient outcomes as central drivers.
For journalist and science communicator Lucy Hawking, whose father Professor Stephen Hawking lived with ALS for over five decades, the opportunity is both scientific and personal.
“The Longitude Prize on ALS is an important step towards increasing our understanding of motor neurone disease, and specifically ALS,” she explained. “I hope the Longitude Prize will encourage the use of AI by researchers and scientists to gain new insights into this devastating condition and advance the search for treatments and a cure… My father lived with MND for over 50 years, the longest known survivor with this condition and his great wish was that one day, a cure would be found.”
Data sharing as social contract
The initiative is also noteworthy for the level of public support it has garnered. According to a recent survey conducted across the UK, US and Australia, 74% of respondents would be happy to share biological data if it might aid research into treatments. Yet just 9% believe MND is a current priority for their government – a dissonance that the Prize’s backers clearly hope to address by reframing the disease not as a niche disorder, but as part of the broader neurodegenerative challenge that aging societies must now confront.
Tanya Curry, Chief Executive at the MND Association, framed the Prize as a turning point.
“Empowering some of the brightest minds across science and technology to come together, the Longitude Prize on ALS will initiate transformative change for people living with motor neurone disease,” she said. “We are investing as a principal funder as enabling such collaborations, as well as the level of unprecedented data we’re working to unlock, marks the start of a significant milestone for drug discovery, the MND Association and wider MND community in how we understand and consequently tackle the disease.”
A model with wider relevance
If successful, the Longitude Prize on ALS may act as a prototype for similar efforts across other age-associated conditions where data are plentiful but insight remains elusive. As longevity science turns increasingly to precision, prevention and platform innovation, the prospect of AI not merely speeding discovery but reshaping its architecture entirely is one that will merit close attention.
Photographs courtesy of Longitude Prize; photograph of Lucy Hawking courtesy of B Lacombe.
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