Tal Medical Secures $14M Financing Round and Adds Industry Veterans to Team
-- New funding will accelerate clinical development of rapid-acting treatment for psychiatric disorders
BOSTON, April 21, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Tal Medical, a clinical-stage medical device company developing a new treatment for depression and other psychiatric disorders, today announced a $14 million funding round from existing investor PureTech, a new institutional investor, and several prominent individual investors. Tal Medical will use the new funding to drive the company's clinical research programs in major depressive and bipolar disorders, advance product development and scale up the organization.
"Our new and existing investors understand the game-changing potential for Tal Medical to help people living with depression, bipolar disorder and other psychiatric disorders," said Jan Skvarka, the company's President and CEO. "Their support is critical to advancing our efforts towards addressing a major unmet need in psychiatry by developing a safe, rapid-acting treatment for patients."
Major depressive disorder (also called unipolar depression) and bipolar disorder (also called manic depression) are emotionally crippling diseases, affecting between 9% and 10% of the US adult population. Worldwide, they are the number one cause of disability and suicide. Current antidepressant medications can take 4 to 10 weeks to work, leaving many patients at a risk for suicide or functional impairment. Due to these limitations in current treatment options, Tal Medical hopes to provide a rapid-acting treatment for people with depression. The company is developing a neurostimulation-based treatment, called Low Field Magnetic Stimulation (LFMS), derived from echo-planar magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging technology. In human clinical trials at McLean Hospital/Harvard University and the National Institutes of Health, LFMS has demonstrated a rapid onset of action without any major side effects in unipolar and bipolar depression patients. A multi-site study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and led by Massachusetts General Hospital is currently testing the treatment durability. More studies are needed to confirm the early findings and establish optimal LFMS treatment regimen.
Tal Medical also announced the addition of two new team members, Mike Madden and Raju Kucherlapati, PhD. Mr. Madden was hired as the company's EVP of Product Development. A medical device industry veteran, Mr. Madden brings 25 years of experience across multiple clinical areas. Prior to Tal Medical, he was the EVP of Engineering at NinePoint Medical, a venture-backed imaging company, and has held several senior R&D roles at Boston Scientific, Medtronic and Bard. Dr. Kucherlapati joined Tal Medical's Board of Directors. He is currently the Paul C. Cabot Professor of Genetics and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kucherlapati was the first Scientific Director of the Harvard-Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics, and a co-founder and a Board member of Abgenix (acquired by Amgen), and Millennium Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Takeda).
About Tal Medical, Inc.
Tal Medical, Inc. is a clinical-stage medical device company developing Low Field Magnetic Stimulation of the brain for the treatment of psychiatric disorders. LFMS is a first-in-class, non-invasive neuromodulation technology that has demonstrated a unique, rapid-acting effect in major depressive disorder and bipolar depression. Tal was founded by PureTech, in conjunction with leading scientists in the fields of depression and neuromodulation.
About PureTech
PureTech is a scientifically driven research and development company that conceptualizes, sources, and validates unexpected and potentially disruptive approaches to advance the needs of human health. Based in Boston, PureTech has an outstanding team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, with connections to top tier academic institutions. PureTech has a thematic, problem-driven approach to developing its innovations, proposing non-obvious solutions rooted in academic research and developing them together with a creative group of cross-disciplinary experts. PureTech concentrates on a handful of major initiative areas at a time, generates and proactively identifies and reviews more than 650 technologies per year, and seeks to select only the most technologically and commercially promising concepts to advance. PureTech has active strategic partnerships with forward thinking health and technology companies.
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