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Sheffield scientists awarded global prize to pursue AI-driven treatments for ALS

The University of Sheffield has been named among the winners of the Longitude Prize Discovery Award, receiving a share of £2 million in funding.

The global prize recognised the Sheffield-led ‘Decode ALS’ consortium as one of the world’s most promising multidisciplinary teams of innovators using AI to find a new drug target for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of motor neuron disease (MND).

The Decode ALS team, led by Professor Johnathan Cooper-Knock and Professor Richard Mead from the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN), has been awarded £100,000 to advance an end-to-end AI pipeline to bridge the gap between genetic discovery and life-saving treatments.

While scientific research often operates in silos, Decode ALS has been developed to combine cutting-edge AI across genetics, genomics, disease biology, and drug discovery into a single, seamless system.

By training AI models on whole-genome sequencing from patients and molecular readouts of the disease, the team can predict how candidate drugs will interact with specific protein structures.

Researchers say this approach will allow them to better understand the causes of ALS and identify potential treatments to halt the progression of the disease.

Richard Mead, Professor of Translational Neuroscience at SITraN and co-lead of Decode ALS, said: "At SITraN, we aren't just looking to understand ALS; we are building the tools to stop it. By integrating AI directly into our drug discovery pipeline, we can now decode patient data at a scale and speed that was previously unimaginable. This award validates our approach of turning big data into tangible new medicines, ensuring Sheffield remains at the forefront of the global effort to end this disease."

The Longitude Prize on ALS is a £7.5 million global challenge prize that is incentivising and rewarding cutting edge AI-based approaches to transform drug discovery to treat ALS.

Following a global call to action in June 2025, 100 teams representing the world’s leading universities, technology giants, advanced medical research organisations and AI pioneers entered the prize.

On May 7, 20 of the most promising entrants, including Decode ALS, received Discovery Awards of £100,000 each, based on their potential to use AI to identify and validate drug targets.

In 2027, 10 teams will progress to a second stage, receiving a further £200,000 to build the evidence base for their proposed therapeutic targets in silico and in the lab.

The following year, five teams will then receive £500,000 to undertake validation of the highest potential identified targets in the wet lab. The winning team will be announced in early 2031 and will be awarded £1 million for identifying and validating the target with the strongest evidence of therapeutic potential. 

The Longitude Prize on ALS is principally funded by the MND Association and designed and delivered by Challenge Works, home of the Longitude Prize.

Tris Dyson, Managing Director at Challenge Works who was diagnosed with ALS in 2023 said: “Ten 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 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. Beating ALS requires the boldest and brightest innovators – and that’s what we have found.”