Longitude Prize on ALS awards £2 million to 20 teams pursuing ALS treatments
Howard Lake | 7 May 2026 | News
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 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 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 (6 December 2024)
- Longitude Prize 2014 goes to antibiotics research (6 July 2014)
- Is it time for an X-Prize for fundraising? (16 February 2017)
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.