The Longitude Prize on ALS has awarded £2 million to 20 international research teams using artificial intelligence to identify new drug targets for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the most common form of motor neurone disease.

The initiative is part of a wider £7.5 million global challenge prize designed to accelerate AI-led drug discovery for ALS, a progressive neurodegenerative disease with limited treatment options and no cure.

The successful teams will each receive £100,000 Discovery Awards alongside access to one of the largest ALS patient datasets assembled for research of this kind.

The data resource combines genomic sequences from 9,000 ALS patients with epigenomics, transcriptomics and proteomics data from more than 2,000 cases, giving researchers access to multiple layers of biological information in a single platform.

The awardees include collaborations involving King’s College London, GlaxoSmithKline, Harvard Medical School, Google Cloud, the University of Pennsylvania, Paris Brain Institute and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases.

The Longitude Prize on ALS launched in June 2025 and attracted almost 100 entries from research organisations, universities, AI specialists and pharmaceutical companies worldwide.

Teams will use AI models and computational biology approaches to identify and validate potential therapeutic targets that could support future ALS drug development.

In 2027, ten teams will progress to the next stage of the programme and receive an additional £200,000 to further investigate their proposed targets using laboratory and in silico research. Five finalists will then secure £500,000 in 2028 to undertake advanced validation studies, with the overall winner receiving a £1 million prize in 2031.

ALS damages nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, gradually affecting movement, speech, swallowing and breathing. Around 90% of motor neurone disease cases involve ALS, and prevalence is expected to rise globally over the coming decades.

Although a small number of treatments can slow disease progression for some patients, there are currently no long-term therapies capable of stopping or reversing the condition.

Organisers say advances in AI and access to increasingly large biological datasets are creating new opportunities to accelerate drug target discovery in neurodegenerative disease research.

Tris Dyson, managing director at Challenge Works, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2023, said: “10 months on from launch, we are celebrating 20 highly collaborative and creative consortiums who have teamed up with a shared goal in mind – to find a treatment for ALS.

“I was confident that the time was right to launch the Longitude Prize on ALS, given huge advances in AI. However, I didn’t quite realise just how impressive a line-up of researchers and innovators it would attract.”

One of the funded researchers, Dr Yentli Soto Albrecht from the University of Pennsylvania team, described the personal impact of the disease and the importance of accelerating treatment research.

She said: “I know that, if nothing changes, I will become one of the 1 in 300 people who will develop ALS in their lifetime.

“I am committed to finding a treatment for ALS before the disease takes me too, a door the Longitude Prize on ALS has opened.”

The Longitude Prize on ALS is principally funded by the MND Association and delivered by Challenge Works with support from Nesta and other international funders including LifeArc, FightMND and The Packard Center at Johns Hopkins.