The president unveiled his $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative focusing on collaborative efforts to leverage advances in genomics, data sharing and health information technology to accelerate biomedical discoveries.

Under the president's budget, the FDA would receive $4.93 billion in federal funding and new and existing user fees. The budget includes $2.7 billion to advance the agency's drug and device activities, with $1.372 billion for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, $456 million for the Center for Devices and Radiological Health and $351 million for the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

On the heels of a report that examined what is and isn't working at the FDA and the NIH, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is launching a bipartisan Innovation for Healthier Americans Initiative to examine the process for getting new cures to patients. Intended to modernize the way drugs and medical devices are discovered, developed and approved, the initiative will bore down on the roles the FDA and NIH play in the process.

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) reintroduced Thursday the Innovation Act, a patent reform bill aimed at reducing predatory patent litigation, also known as patent trolling. An earlier version, originally introduced by Goodlatte in 2013, was passed by the House but pulled from the Senate agenda last year.