BD opens professional service center in San Antonio; Hansen Medical names Peter Mariani as CFO;

> Becton, Dickinson celebrated the grand opening of its new North American Professional Service Center in San Antonio, TX on Friday. The site currently employs 125 BD associates and is expected to bring a total of nearly 300 new jobs to the Alamo City when fully operational. BD release

> Hansen Medical, a global leader in flexible robotics and the developer of robotic technology for accurate 3D control of catheter movement, has announced that veteran financial executive Peter Mariani has been named chief financial officer, effective June 20. He will report directly to President and CEO Bruce Barclay. Hansen Medical release

> A North Bay startup that's developing diagnostic equipment for sleep apnea plans to move to Sonoma County after winning a competition giving it free office space and professional support for a year. Report

> One of the hottest topics in drug development these days is developing a companion diagnostic for an experimental drug. While that's no easy task, the upstart Clovis Oncology announced that it has teamed with Roche to do just that for one of its preclinical covalent drug programs. Story

> Nuvera Biosciences has reported positive results of a blinded validation study on its breast cancer assay for taxane chemotherapy response. In the interim analysis, researchers concluded that assay prediction of treatment sensitivity was associated with excellent and significantly improved three-year distant relapse-free survival  following adjuvant taxane-chemotherapy or combined chemo- and endocrine therapy. Nuvera release

> NovoStent has named Rick Randall chairman of the board. Randall is currently CEO and chairman of Avantis Medical Systems and chairman of TranS1. Report

> Through an innovative partnership with an Israeli technology incubator, Akron venture capital firm Everett Partners is hoping to bring several medical device firms' U.S. headquarters to Northeast Ohio. Article

And Finally... A new prosthetic hand--strong enough to lift a chair, yet gentle enough to hold an egg--has won accolades from Popular Science magazine, thanks partly to custom-made springs from a Grafton firm. News