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| Longitude Prize | |
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| Sponsored by |
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| Reward(s) | £10 million |
| Website | www |
The Longitude Prize is an inducement prize contest offered by Challenge Works, a social enterprise which was historically part of Nesta, a British lottery funded charity, in the spirit of the 18th-century Longitude rewards.[1] It runs a £10 million prize fund, offering an £8 million payout to the team of researchers that develops an affordable, accurate, and fast point of care test for bacterial infection that is easy to use anywhere in the world. Such a test will allow the conservation of antibiotics for future generations and help solve the global problem of antimicrobial resistance.[2][3]
The prize was announced by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron in 2013,[4] and a shortlist of six challenges to be put to a public vote was announced at the BBC's Broadcasting House in May 2014.[5][6]
A committee chaired by Lord Martin Rees,[7] the Astronomer Royal, chose the six challenges that were to be put to a public vote,[5] and subsequently decided the format of the prize and the specific challenges that must be met to win.[5] The other committee members are:[8]
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The members of the AMR Prize Advisory Panel are:[9]
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The choice of challenges for the Prize was presented on an episode of the BBC science programme Horizon,[5] with a poll opened to the public afterwards. The options were:[5]
The winner, antibiotics, was announced on The One ShowonBBC 1 on 25 June.[5] The committee issued a draft of the criteria with a two-week opportunity for open review, which finished 10 August 2014.[10]
The vote was urged and welcomed by the Biochemical Society[11] and Jamie Reed, the Shadow Minister for Health at the time and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Antibiotics (APPG-A), who said "The scale of the challenge that antimicrobial resistance presents is beyond any doubt and new innovative thinking is essential."[12]
Since the announcement of the Longitude Prize, the foundation has selected thirteen organizations for seed funding between £10,000 and £25,000 to go toward their research.[13] Called Discovery Awards, there have been three rounds of these grants.[14]
The Longitude Prize on Dementia was announced in 2022, with the Discovery Awards being made between June 2023 and May 2024.[15]
The first prize of £8m was awarded to Sysmex Astrego on 12 June 2024[16] for a antibiotic susceptibility test for urinary tract infection based on an invention [17] from Uppsala University.
This is an issue which must be urgently addressed...what is really scary is that the threat of AMR (Antimicrobial resistance) is insidiously building; unless we act now it will creep up on the world and influence practically every area of modern medicine...To me, antibiotic resistance is the obvious choice for the Longitude Prize; indeed, without antibiotics many of the discoveries in the other challenge areas could be rendered useless.
