ALS Prediction Prize4Life Challenge
ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), or Lou Gehrig's disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease with no known cure and few known causes. In July of 2012, Prize4Life launched a challenge to most accurately predict the rate of progression of ALS in patients. The ALS Prediction Prize4Life Challenge ran on the InnoCentive prize platform and featured a subset of the PRO-ACT (Pooled Resource Open-Access ALS Clinical Trials) database, the largest compilation of ALS clinical trial data ever assembled. The complete PRO-ACT database contains the clinical records of over 8500 ALS patients.
In October of 2012, Lilly Fang and I were awarded first prize in the challenge, an honor shared with Liuxia Wang and Guang Li of Sentrana, Inc. See our RECOMB 2012 slides or this longer slide deck for a summary of our approach and the Nature Biotechnology article for more details on the challenge.