Outsee wins award to support AI search for ALS treatments
Longitude Prize gives company funding, access to patient genetic data
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- Outsee received an award to use AI for discovering new ALS treatments.
- The company's Nomaly platform will analyze genomic data from 9,000 ALS patients.
- The goal is to identify new therapeutic targets for ALS treatment.
Outsee has been selected for a Discovery Award from the Longitude Prize on ALS to support the use of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based platform and large-scale patient genomic data to identify new therapeutic targets for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The Longitude Prize on ALS is a £7.5 million (about $10.1 million) global initiative aimed at accelerating the discovery of ALS treatments by harnessing advances in AI.
As part of the award, Outsee will gain access to genomic data from 9,000 people with ALS, along with £100,000 (about $134,000) in funding. The company plans to use its AI-powered predictive genomics platform, Nomaly, to analyze the data and uncover new insights that could lead to new ALS treatments.
“We are excited to have been selected for a Discovery Award, which will enable us to access genomic data from ALS patients on an unprecedented scale,” Chang Lu, PhD, Outsee’s chief scientific officer, said in a company press release.
ALS is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease that affects motor neurons, the nerve cells that control voluntary movement. As these cells are damaged and die, muscles weaken, and patients may eventually lose the ability to move, speak, swallow, and breathe independently. The condition affects an estimated one in 300 people, and its prevalence is expected to rise as the global population ages.
5-year project starts with 9-month discovery phase
The Longitude Prize on ALS is structured as a five-year, multi-stage competition designed to use AI to navigate the complexities of ALS and identify new biological pathways and therapeutic targets for the disease.
The Discovery Award is the first stage, in which 20 teams receive £100,000 each and nine months to use AI-based approaches to identify promising ALS therapeutic targets.
This first stage is entirely computational and provides teams with access to what the company describes as the world’s largest and most comprehensive ALS patient dataset. This includes full genetic information from 9,000 people with ALS, with 2,000 of those cases having additional biological data showing how genes are regulated, which genes are active, and which proteins are present. Brain imaging and clinical information, such as symptoms and disease course, are included in the dataset.
From there, 10 teams advance to a 12-month stage in which they receive £200,000 each to strengthen evidence for their proposed targets using computational and laboratory approaches and prioritize the most promising ones.
Five teams will then move to a 24-month validation stage, receiving £500,000 each to carry out extensive laboratory validation of the most promising targets. One team will ultimately receive £1 million for demonstrating the strongest therapeutic potential for ALS treatment.
Outsee will use its genomics-first platform to analyze the available dataset during the project’s first stage. Unlike approaches that start with a predefined hypothesis, Nomaly uses predictive modeling to analyze the molecular and cellular biology of the genome, which allows it to predict disease and biological traits directly from a single genome.
According to the company, the platform may be able to detect biological signals in datasets that have already been studied using other methods.
Once it identifies potential ALS targets, Outsee will work with partners, including researchers at the University of Oxford, to provide ALS-specific expertise and move promising targets toward further development.
“We have already built a strong internal pipeline of targets in CNS [central nervous system, which comprises the brain and spinal cord] diseases, and are confident that our breakthrough genomics platform and expertise in AI-driven target identification uniquely place OutSee to unlock new insights into the mechanisms that underpin ALS, and to translate those insights into valuable new therapeutic targets,” Lu said.
The Longitude Prize on ALS is funded mainly by the MND Association. Additional supporters include Nesta, the Alan Davidson Foundation, My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, LifeArc, FightMND, The 10,000 Brains Project, Answer ALS, and Johns Hopkins’ Packard Center.
Rett Lynch
My long term girlfriend has been diagnosed with ALS. I’m trying to get her into a new trial for treatment. She is 55