Longitude Prize on ALS launches to award £7.5 million to AI drug target discoveries for most common form of MND 

The Packard Center is part of a cohort of funders supporting a new global initiative to accelerate drug discovery for ALS treatments.

The Longitude Prize on ALS is a new £7.5 million [~$10 million USD] global challenge prize to incentivize and reward cutting edge AI-based approaches to transform drug discovery for the treatment of ALS, the most common form of MND. 

Open for entries from June 25 until December 3, 2025, it will initially award 20 teams £100,000 each in early 2026, with one team going on to win £1 million at the end of the five year Prize. 

Although some very limited treatments exist to slow the progression of ALS 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. 

Beyond financial reward, successful applicants will gain access to the largest and most comprehensive collections of ALS patient data of its kind, 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. 

Seeking innovators from across medical research, biotech, techbio, pharmaceuticals and AI, the Prize 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. 

The Prize is principally funded by the Motor Neurone Disease Association and designed and delivered by Challenge Works, supported by Nesta, alongside additional global funders, including the Robert Packard Center and Answer ALS. 

Dr. Jeffrey Rothstein, Founder and Executive Director of the Robert Packard Center said: “In my over thirty-five years of ALS research, I’ve never been more optimistic about the potential for a drug discovery to significantly alter the progression of ALS and offer the possibility of disease reversal. Launching the Longitude Prize on ALS represents a pivotal moment in our fight against this devastating disease. Bringing together the world’s biological and clinical data on ALS, amounting to the largest ALS patient data set of its kind and using advancements in AI to analyze it, combined with fresh perspectives from AI researchers, is exactly the kind of innovation and collaboration we need.”

For more information and details: https://als.longitudeprize.org/