President Barack Obama didn't exactly set the biopharma world on fire with the 2015 State of the Union address, devoting only three sentences to drug research and development. What he did say, however – that the federal government will launch "a new precision medicine initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes" – could add momentum to a flurry of dealmaking linking the use of biomarkers and genomic profiling to drug discovery and development.