President Obama revealed his eighth and final White House budget on Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016, outlining plans for spending priorities in fiscal year 2017. In the healthcare realm, the president's budget included few surprises. The budget proposal would give the National Institutes of Health $33.1 billion, a 2.6% increase over 2016. The funding would include $680 million for Vice President Biden's cancer initiative; $100 million more for the Precision Medicine Initiative's 1-million person cohort study; and $45 million in added funds for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative. Aside from these three targeted programs, all of NIH's 27 institutes and centers except the National Cancer Institute would receive no increase compared to FY2016.

The Absorb bioresorbable vascular scaffold (BVS) is on par with a traditional everolimus-eluting stent (EES) when it comes to safety (with the exception of a stronger link to target vessel-related myocardial infarction) a meta-analysis of one-year outcomes has found. As reported in The Lancet , recipients of the Absorb BVS and the Xience EES had similar combined rates of mortality, myocardial infarction, and revascularization within 12 months. The authors of the study concluded that "...the aggregate of available evidence supports the safety and effectiveness of BVS at 1 year for treatment of patients with stable coronary artery disease and stabilized acute coronary syndromes."

[Bartlett et al. (2016) Annual Review of Physiology] The filtration apparatus of the glomerulus comprises four specialized cell types: fenestrated endothelial cells, podocytes, perivascular mesangial cells, and parietal epithelial cells. A variety of growth factors, notably VEGF, ANGPT, EGF, SEMA3A, TGF-β, and CXCL12, signal in paracrine fashions among these cells to create and maintain filtration barrier function.