Biotechs boost bad puns and poor analogies.

News Ltd Tim Boreham is at it again, this time scattering with abandon hyperbole such as nuclear winter, patent cliff and biotech orchards..ripe for the picking. And just what is it that compels this terrible tsunami of tautology?

Driving the trend is the desire of global drug companies to refresh their product repertoire as a slew of big-name drugs go off-patent in the next few years....

....According to Lavelle, big pharma companies have discovered their own R&D efforts have not yielded the next blockbuster drugs.

"So they're looking around for clever stuff from biotechs globally," she says.

That is one driver, another is the desire by the venture capitalists to cash in

"There is a conflict between being a business and getting rid of it at a seemingly good price but well below the potential of the business."

Of course not all shareholders were fortunate or able to buy in at venture capital prices, a source of further conflict. What a venture capitalist deems as being a "good price" may not be how an ordinary shareholder views their investment, with each party equally entitled to their opinion.

Collectively this conflict could bring stormy weather to the orchard of plenty sending those share farm chickens back home to roost

Behind the good news about lucrative deals, there is some disquiet that founders of innovative technology are selling out too cheaply for short-term gains.

The Cellestis deal faces an early backlash from a group of investors claiming to account for about 30 per cent of the register.

With full patent protection, a global marketing and distribution network and a unique product, a pre-molecular diagnostic of latent infection, Cellestis has the potential to consistently bear more fruit than one opportunistic windfall.