Caroline Purslow, Head of Health at Challenge Works, discusses the Longitude Prize on ALS, the deeply personal story behind its creation, and how AI can help to transform treatment and care for those with ALS.

Two years ago, my friend and colleague, Tris, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) – the most common form of motor neurone disease (MND). He was 44, and was told that he had three years left to live – five if he was lucky.

The motor neurones that carry the signals from his brain to his muscles were dying without explanation and, within a relatively short space of time, he would not be able to walk, speak, drink, eat, or, eventually, breathe. A devastating diagnosis made worse by discovering that there was not only no cure, but also very few treatments.

There is a 1 in 300 chance that a person will develop MND in their lifetime, and it can affect adults of any age. In the UK, around 5,000 people are living with MND at any one time – around 90% of these cases will have ALS. Although some very limited treatments exist to slow the progression of the disease for a short time, the complexity of the disease means that there are no long-term treatments, and in turn, no cure.

© shutterstock/bangoland

Launch of the Longitude Prize on ALS

Tris is the Managing Director of Challenge Works, part of innovation foundation Nesta. Together, we design and run challenge prizes – global competitions that reward innovators who develop solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges: from rapid diagnostics to tackle superbugs; to assistive technologies for people living with dementia.

Challenge prizes are powerful tools for incentivising innovators to solve longstanding, complex global problems. They offer financial rewards to whoever can first, or best, solve a problem, supporting multiple diverse ideas to progress through the stages of a competition with seed funding and non-financial support. This approach levels the playing field for innovators, helping the most promising ideas to progress, regardless of whether the innovators behind them are well-known and established, or new and yet to be tested.

When Tris received his diagnosis, he found the void of innovation – and hope – in ALS treatments simply unbelievable. As did I. The lack of current treatments, coupled with our knowledge around innovation and technology, thanks to our line of work, led us to an obvious conclusion: the time was ripe to launch a challenge prize to help tackle ALS.

On 25 June 2025, the Longitude Prize on ALS officially opened for entries. Principally funded by the MND Association, it is incentivising the use of artificial intelligence (AI) based approaches to transform drug discovery for the treatment of ALS, the most common form of MND.

AI for drug discovery

AI-enabled drug discovery is an area of low investment and high risk, making it the sweet spot for a challenge prize. While challenge prizes offer unique approaches to tackling complex diseases such as ALS, the use of AI in a medical setting is not uncommon. In fact, AI is now regularly being used across the medical and healthcare sectors in a variety of ways – such as through virtual health assistants, improving diagnostics and, indeed, drug discovery.

Microsoft AI, for example, has been hailed as better than doctors at diagnosing disease, and the UK’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has repeatedly outlined AI’s transformative ability to make the NHS more human by increasing efficiencies across administrative tasks to free up doctors’ workloads, allowing them to spend more time with patients.

Another example of AI’s versatility is the central role it plays in the Longitude Prize on Dementia, whereby innovators are using assistive technologies to create ‘cognitive prosthetics’, helping people with the early stages of the disease to live independently for longer.

Looking further afield and beyond a healthcare setting, the utility and range of AI is only increasing.

Earlier this year, the UK Government and Challenge Works announced the winner of the Manchester Prize – the national prize rewarding AI for public good. Polaron was awarded £1m for its AI technology that dramatically accelerates the development of new advanced materials – specifically for the design of batteries, where it has increased energy density by 10%. This is the equivalent of an extra 20 miles of range to an electric vehicle.

How could AI transform treatment and care for MND patients?

But what has any of this got to do with motor neurone disease? The answer is speed.

To put it into perspective, Polaron has been able to demonstrate that its AI models can explore thousands of material designs in under a day – a task that would take current state-of-the-art physics-based simulations around 50 years.

For the Longitude Prize on ALS, AI will help us to explore and analyse data, including multiple datasets and different types of datasets, all at once – and at an unprecedented pace. Accelerating the rate at which we can discover specific molecules in the body that can first be targeted, and then used to develop a treatment, is something that offers real hope for complex diseases like MND.

© shutterstock/CC7

The availability of this data will be central to the Prize’s success, as the greater the volume of data we can analyse, the more likely we are to discover suitable drug targets. Thanks to tireless fundraising over the last decade, we are now in a position where we have more MND patient data than ever before. The challenge is that this information lies in fragmented datasets dotted around the world, each of which comes with unique access restrictions and formations.

For this data to be most useful, it all needs to be available in one place and subject to the same access requirements. This is why the Longitude Prize on ALS will convene one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of ALS patient data.

In collaboration with global data partners, the Prize will offer participants access to this data at an unprecedented scale. This database, on which AI models can be built and trained, will accelerate the pathway towards drug discovery at a speed we have not yet encountered.

How will the Prize work?

Prize teams will require a varied set of expertise, spanning across both complex neurodegenerative disease and an understanding of and ability to use AI to analyse data. While some applicants may have individuals in their networks with complementary skills with whom they can form a team, other prospective applicants may be able to provide one, but not both elements.

To support applicants to build the strongest possible teams, Challenge Works is facilitating connections between participants with a ‘match making’ process that will ensure each team has a balance of biological and technical expertise.

Following the initial entry period, the Prize will support teams through various stages:

• April 2026: 20 teams will receive £100,000 ‘Discovery Awards’ to identify new high potential therapeutic targets.
• May 2027: Ten of these teams will receive a further £200,000 to build the evidence base for their proposed therapeutic targets in-silico, using computational models to test their research.
• September 2028: Five teams will receive £500,000 to undertake validation of the highest potential identified targets in the wet lab to further test their research.
• January 2031: One winning team will be awarded £1m for finding the target with the strongest evidence of therapeutic potential.

Ambition, vision and creativity are fundamental to solving complex problems – and these values are at the heart of challenge prizes, given that they foster innovation and create opportunities for the world’s brightest ideas to be seen, heard and developed.

I truly believe that the Longitude Prize on ALS will supercharge transformative change for ALS drug discovery. For the first time ever, we may be able to outpace motor neurone disease, accelerating the development of long-term treatments, and – at last – bring some hope to people with ALS and their families who are living alongside this devastating disease.

Please note, this article will also appear in the 23rd edition of our quarterly publication.