Caroline Purslow, Head of Health at Challenge Works, discusses the ALS longitude award, the deep personal story behind its creation, and how AI can help change the treatment and care of people with ALS.
Two years ago, my friend and colleague Tris was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This is the most common form of motor neuronal disease (MND). He was 44 years old and was said to have lived there for three years.
The motor neurons carrying signals from his brain to the muscles were almost dying without explanation, and in a relatively short time he was unable to walk, talk, drink, eat, and ultimately breathe. The catastrophic diagnosis was exacerbated by the discovery that there was little treatment, not just treatment.
There is one in 300th of a person’s chances of developing MND in their lifetime, which can affect adults of all ages. In the UK, around 5,000 people live with MND at once. Approximately 90% of these cases have ALS. There are very limited treatments to slow the progression of the disease for a short period of time, but the complexity of this disease means there is no long-term treatment and, as a result, no treatment.
Launch of ALS Longitude Award
Tris is the managing director of Challenge Works, part of Innovation Foundation Nesta. Together, we design and execute the Challenge Awards. A global competition rewards innovators who develop solutions to some of the world’s toughest challenges: from rapid diagnosis to superbug tackling. To assistive technology for people with dementia.
Challenge prizes are a powerful tool to encourage innovators to solve long-standing complex global problems. They provide financial rewards to the first or best person, solve problems, support diverse ideas, advance the stage of competition with seed funding and non-financial support. This approach evaluates the playing field for innovators and helps the most promising ideas advance whether the innovators behind them are well known, established or newly tested.
When Tris was diagnosed, he found himself incredible with the innovation and hope gap in ALS treatment. My current lack of treatment, thanks to our work, coupled with knowledge of innovation and technology, led us to a clear conclusion.
On June 25th, 2025, ALS’s Longitude Awards officially opened for entry. Funded primarily by the MND Association, it encourages the use of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based approach to convert drug discovery for the treatment of ALS, the most common form of MND.
AI for drug discovery
AI-enabled drug discovery is a field with little investment and high risk, and has become a sweet spot for challenge awards. Challenge prizes offer a unique approach to tackling complex illnesses such as ALS, but the use of AI in healthcare settings is not uncommon. In fact, AI is currently regularly used throughout the healthcare and health sector in a variety of ways, including virtual health assistants, improving diagnostics, and actually drug discovery.
For example, Microsoft AI is welcomed to be superior to physicians in diagnosing illnesses, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer can repeatedly outline AI’s transformational capabilities to make the NHS more human by increasing the efficiency of overall management tasks, allowing them to spend more time with patients.
Another example of AI diversity is the central role it plays in longitude awards for dementia. This allows innovators to use assistive technology to create “cognitive prosthetics” to help people with early stages of illness live independently and longer.
Looking further afield, beyond the healthcare environment, AI utilities and scope are increasing.
Earlier this year, the UK Government and Challenge Works announced the winners of the Manchester Prize. Polaron has been awarded £1 million for AI technology, which dramatically accelerates the development of new and advanced materials. In particular, it is for designing batteries with an increased energy density of 10%. This corresponds to an extra 20 miles of an electric vehicle.
How can AI transform the treatment and care of patients with MND?
But what does this have to do with motor neuron disease? The answer is speed.
To put that into perspective, Polaron was able to demonstrate that its AI model could explore thousands of material designs within a day.
For ALS longitude awards, AI helps you to investigate and analyze data that includes multiple data sets and different types of data sets at once and at an unprecedented pace. Accelerating the rate at which specific molecules can be targeted first in the body and then used to develop treatments provides real hope for complex diseases like MND.
The availability of this data is central to award success, as the greater the amount of data you can analyze, the more likely you will find the right drug target. Thanks to tireless funding over the past decade, we are in a position to have more MND patient data than ever before. The challenge is that this information resides in fragmented datasets scattered around the world. Each comes with its own access restrictions and formation.
For this data to be most convenient, everything must be available in one location and be subject to the same access requirements. This is why the ALS Longitude Awards convenes one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of ALS patient data.
Working with our Global Data Partners, the award will enable participants to access this data on an unprecedented scale. This database, which allows you to build and train AI models, accelerates the path to discovery of creatures at speeds that have not yet been encountered.
How do awards work?
Prize teams need a variety of expertise sets that span both complex neurodegenerative diseases and the ability to analyze data using AI. Some applicants may have individuals in a network with complementary skills that can form a team, while other prospective applicants may be able to offer it rather than both elements.
To support applicants in building the most powerful team possible, Challenge Works promotes connections between participants in a “matchmaking” process that ensures that each team balances their biological and technical expertise.
Following the initial input period, the award supports the team through various stages.
April 2026: 20 teams will receive a £100,000 “Discovery Award” to identify new potential treatment targets. May 2027: Ten of these teams will receive an additional £200,000 to build an evidence base for proposed treatment goals within Silico and test the study using computational models. September 2028: Five teams receive £500,000 and test the research further by examining the highest potential identified targets in the wet lab. January 2031: One winner team will be awarded £1 million to find a 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 the Challenge Awards, considering that they promote innovation and create opportunities for the world’s brightest ideas to be seen, heard and developed.
I believe that ALS’s Longitude Awards will surpass transformative change for ALS Soumi. For the first time, we may be able to outweigh motor neuron disease, accelerate the onset of long-term treatment, and finally bring hope to ALS and their families living with this devastating illness.
This article will also be featured in the 23rd edition of Quarterly Publication.
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