An esteemed independent panel of global experts has been assembled to judge submissions for the Longitude Prize on ALS, a five-year, £7.5 million international challenge prize set up to incentivise the use of AI to transform drug discovery for the treatment of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), the most common form of MND (motor neurone disease).
The newly appointed judges are all leaders in their field and come from across the neuroscience, technology and pharmaceutical sectors, representing organisations including King’s College London, Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Insilico Medicine, and C-CAMP Bangalore.
The panel also includes the Chair of the Prize’s Patient Advocacy Committee, Marc Barlow, who will act as a patient spokesperson.
Judging the entries will be:
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Professor Ammar Al Chalabi – Professor of Neurology and Complex Disease Genetics at King’s College London, Director of the King’s Motor Neuron Disease Care and Research Centre and Co-director of the UK MND RI (UK)
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Professor Jeffrey Rothstein MD – Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and founder and director of the Packard Center for ALS Research (USA)
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Professor Matthew Kiernan – Chief Executive Officer and Institute Director of Neuroscience Research Australia, with expertise in neurodegenerative diseases (Australia)
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Professor Nortina Shahrizaila – Professor of Neurology at University of Malaysia, and President-Elect of PACTALS (Malaysia)
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Dr Taslim Saiyed – Director and CEO of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP), accelerating research and entrepreneurship across the life sciences sector (India)
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Professor Ernest Fraenkel - Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), co-directing the Center for Data-Driven Therapeutics (USA)
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Dr Petrina Kamya – Global Head of AI Platforms at Insilico Medicine, focused on advancing AI and Machine Learning technologies to streamline drug development and accelerate the time-to-market for innovative solutions (Canada)
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Professor Fabian Theis – Head of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, and chair of the Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems programme at the Technical University of Munich (Germany)
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Dr Jackie Hunter – Founder of OI Pharma Partners and Chief Executive Officer of Benevolent Bio, a leader in applying advanced AI to accelerate biopharma drug discovery (UK)
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Dr Lisa Broad – Vice President, Neuroscience and Managing Director of Lilly Research Labs (LRL) in the UK, leading projects to identify new therapies in neurodegenerative diseases (UK)
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Dr Vishal Gulati – Founding and Managing Partner of Recode Ventures, a specialist VC firm dedicated to investing in healthcare AI companies (UK)
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Marc Barlow – Chair of the Prize’s Patient Advocacy Committee, MND activist, and previous Head of Strategic Marketing for GE Healthcare (UK).
Applications to the Prize opened in June and remain open until 3 December 2025. Following the initial entry period, the Prize will support teams through four stages:
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April 2026: 20 teams will receive £100,000 to identify new, high-potential therapeutic targets.
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May 2027: 10 teams will receive a further £200,000 to build the evidence base for their proposed therapeutic targets in-silico.
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September 2028: Five teams will receive £500,000 to undertake validation of drug targets that have been identified as having the highest potential.
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January 2031: One winning team that presents the drug target with the strongest evidence of therapeutic potential will be awarded the £1 million prize.