Packard Center celebrates the 20 international teams awarded £2 million in the Longitude Prize on ALS 

The twenty Discovery Award winners of the Longitude Prize on ALS were recently announced. The Longitude Prize on ALS is a global initiative supported by the Packard Center in partnership with leading ALS and MND organizations. These awards recognize innovative research projects that have the potential to accelerate breakthroughs in ALS and advance the search for effective treatments.

Following a global call to action last year, the £7.5 million Prize has awarded £100,000 each to 20 promising multidisciplinary teams, comprising over 70 organizations from 12 countries. These innovators will now use AI to identify and validate new drug targets for the treatment of ALS. Eight of the selected teams have a direct connection to the Packard Center, as they include current or former Packard-funded investigators. In addition, Packard Center founder Dr. Jeffrey Rothstein served on the Prize Judging Panel, and Packard Center board member Ed Rapp serves on the Prize’s Patient Advocacy Group.

To drive this discovery, the teams have been granted access to the largest and most comprehensive ALS patient dataset of its kind, combining multiple types of biological information, including the genomic sequences of 9,000 ALS patients and multi-omics data for over 2,000 cases. 

Find out more about the winning teams and their projects at als.longitudeprize.org