With only weeks to go in 2022, the three major pharmas each had inked between 16 and 20 deals. Meanwhile, Pfizer has been less busy with 12 deals, but those include M&A totaling $18.2bn.

Mersana will help J&J develop antibody-drug conjugates against three targets, while AstraZeneca out-licenses a candidate for peripheral artery disease to Regio.

The last thing you need on a Friday afternoon is for one of your biotech holdings to open the trading session down by more than 7%. And as the company in question was the large capitalization and profitable antiviral specialist Gilead Sciences, I did wonder if a new global conflict rather than a Ukrainian ceasefire had just been announced. But in this case, the news that took Gilead's share price down was entirely of its own making and, even worse, the reaction was in response to Gilead's best of intentions.

As investors in life science stocks, and biotechnology companies in particular, suffered another week of significant losses there are still voices of denial from the analyst community that have completely missed the point of what the market is telling them. The generalist investor is selling out of biotech and nothing can stop the exit.