# Longitude Prize on ALS awards £2 million to 20 teams pursuing ALS treatments

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2026/05/07/longitude-prize-on-als-awards-2-million-to-20-teams-pursuing-als-treatments/
- Published: 2026-05-07T12:33:24+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**The Longitude Prize on ALS is designed to incentivise and reward cutting-edge,
AI-based approaches to transform drug discovery for ALS, the progressive neurodegenerative
disease that is currently without a cure.**

A total of £2 million has been awarded to 20 highly promising multidisciplinary 
teams from 12 countries, including over 70 organisations such as King’s College 
London, Harvard Medical School, and Google Cloud. Each successful team receives **
£100,000** in funding and essential access to the largest and most comprehensive
ALS patient dataset of its kind. This unprecedented dataset combines genomic sequences
for 9,000 ALS patients with multi-omics data for over 2,000 cases, information that
has never been available in a single place before.

The immediate goal for these teams is to leverage their expertise and AI to identify
and validate new drug targets, thereby deepening the understanding of the disease
and accelerating future drug discovery efforts. The complexity of ALS means that
while limited treatments exist to slow progression temporarily, a long-term cure
remains elusive. Advances in AI now offer an opportunity to unlock vast quantities
of patient data and “outpace the disease”.

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There is a [1 in 300 chance](https://www.mndassociation.org/about-mnd/mnd-explained/what-is-mnd)
that a person will develop MND in their lifetime and around 90% of cases will have
ALS.

## Further funding rounds

[The Longitude Prize on ALS](https://als.longitudeprize.org/) is principally funded
by the **Motor Neurone Disease Association** (MND Association) and is designed and
delivered by **Challenge Works**, with support from **Nesta**. 

Additional funders include Nesta, The Alan Davidson Foundation, My Name’5 Doddie
Foundation, LifeArc, FightMND, The 10,000 Brains Project, Answer ALS and The Packard
Center at Johns Hopkins.

Further funding rounds are scheduled: ten teams will advance in 2027 to receive 
£200,000 each, and five teams will receive £500,000 in 2028 for target validation.
The ultimate winner, who identifies and validates the target with the strongest 
therapeutic potential, will be announced in early 2031 and receive £1 million.

Tanya Curry, Chief Executive of the MND Association, restated the importance of 
the investment:

> “Our vision is a world free from MND and this can be achieved through funding 
> leading researchers to chase down new treatments. . . every step forward in research
> brings hope”.

 * **[2025’s Longitude Prize to focus on ALS](https://fundraising.co.uk/2024/12/06/2025s-global-longitude-prize-to-focus-on-als/)(
   6 December 2024)
 * **[Longitude Prize 2014 goes to antibiotics research](https://fundraising.co.uk/2014/07/06/longitude-prize-2014-goes-antibiotics-research/)(
   6 July 2014)
 * **[Is it time for an X-Prize for fundraising?](https://fundraising.co.uk/2017/02/16/time-for-an-x-prize-for-fundraising/)(
   16 February 2017)**