Tal Medical said it won funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, allowing the company to conduct a clinical trial of its Low Field Magnetic Stimulation technology in treating depression.

The LFMS technology is a non-invasive neuromodulation system that delivers magnetic stimulation to the brain through an external electromagnetic coil.

The NIMH awarded the funding through its Rapidly Acting Treatments for Treatment Resistant Depression program, a new initiative dedicated to identifying and testing “promising anti-depressant interventions,” according to a press release.

The federal funding brings Tal Medical’s take to about $6 million in support of its trial, according to a spokesperson for PureTech Ventures, a life sciences venture capital group that helped launch Tal Medical in 2010.

The LMFS trial is funded on a contract between NIHMH and Massachusetts General Hospital, according to PureTech. The trial is a 90-patient, 6-site, sham-controlled study in patients who have responded negatively to 1-3 antidepressant treatments. In addition to MGH, the trial will also be run by Yale, Mount Sinai and Emory, among other leading hospitals.

“There is a well-documented lack of innovation in the field of antidepressant drug development and LFMS has the potential to break this paradigm and offer patients a clinical profile completely different from that of current therapies. The sham-controlled data with LFMS indicate an antidepressant response within minutes of patients receiving a single 20 minute LFMS treatment,” Tal Medical co-founder and chairman Dr. Steve Paul said in prepared remarks.

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