"With that pharma head on, he recognised that one needs to continue to add to the asset base," says Mr Curnock Cook, who used to run Rothschild's life sciences private equity fund and is now seeking to raise £100m for Bioscience Managers, a new biotechnology fund. The sector is deal hungry, as last week's merger between cancer specialists Xenova and KS Biomedix demonstrates.Dr Fellner's background in pharmaceuticals has helped him develop his business model. Celltech also beat off interest from Sir Christopher himself.In just six months at British Biotech, Dr Fellner has already snapped up biotechs RiboTargets and Vernalis, and industry observers say he is likely to buy more. Its £100m purchase of Oxford Glycosciences earlier this year scotched the merger plans of rival Cambridge Antibody Technology. He has spent the intervening 13 years building a company made up of two parts.One part, derived mainly from his £550m takeover of Medeva in 2000, makes run-of-the-mill products like cough mixture. They may be dull but they bring in cash that can then be used to fund the second part of the business: research for a wide variety treatments for diseases such as cancer, arthritis and asthma.Celltech can also invest in the UK sector and take advantage of smaller companies' difficulties in raising money.

Celltech will report interim results on Tuesday and is expected to announce profits of around £15m. The shy, serious biochemist began his career in pharmaceuticals, joining Celltech as chief executive in 1990. "You can make decisions, pick deals, make offers, negotiate and pull out without anyone caring."The chirpy entrepreneur from South Wales made his name when he grew the value of genomics company Chiroscience from almost nothing to £200m in 1999, when it merged with Dr Fellner's Celltech.In contrast, Dr Fellner has taken the route of creating a plc that has bought up other smaller companies to form the largest biotechnology group in the UK. His company acts as an umbrella for the developing biotechs, and tries to help the scientists turn their experiments into a saleable product, away from the spotlight of the stock market "It's a little bit easier in the private sector," he says. Sir Christopher Evans, chairman of fund manager Merlin Biosciences, and Dr Peter Fellner, chairman of Celltech as well as fallen angel British Biotech, are taking different approaches to building the sector in this country.Sir Christopher raises money from institutional investors and has put it into 26 small biotechnology companies, such as ReNeuron, which uses foetal stem cells to develop treatments for neurological diseases including Alzheimer's. But many UK investors in biotechnology are getting tired of waiting.

Since the late 1980s, up to £4bn of cash has been pumped into the sector in this country - but with minimal returns.However, the top biotech entrep- reneurs have found ways around the funding problem. You only find that out eight years later," says Jeremy Curnock Cook, a well-known biotechnology investor. "Just because someone cries 'Eureka!' in a lab, doesn't mean you have a cure for cancer. [The customers] are people who have fallen under the spell of the world of celebrity.". Heat's Mr Frith says further Emap launches are not out of the question: "The market keeps going up and up all the time. A research note from Investec Securities, an investment bank, reads: "The only negative [in the ABCs] we can find is that the growth rate is starting to slow as Heat and Closer mature."A relative old-timer, Now magazine has shown more subdued growth than its younger rivals, up 4 per cent year on year for the first half, while Heat's 18 per cent falls far short of the 100 per cent rise it enjoyed the year before.But the publishers involved have faith that growth will continue. "Readers want to see the real-life problems of celebrities, not just the PR side of things They want to know the truth about celebrities ...

They want the minutiae, the marriage break-ups, the weddings, but not a sanitised version of them."However, analysts in the City are not convinced that the public's appetite for celebrity gossip is entirely insatiable. "That was new, but it's not so new any more.""The market is very sophisticated now," says Ms Johnson. Like Emap, his publishing empire has benefited handsomely from the public's obsession with celebrity snaps and gossip.But it is the irreverent style of Heat and some of the tabloids that is making the waves rather than the public relations-led interviews of OK! and Hello!"When Hello! launched, I remember thinking, 'Wow! [celebrities] letting a camera in their bar mitzvahs and weddings,'" says Marc Mendoza, chief executive of the Media Planning Group, a media buying firm. Richard Desmond's own paper, the Daily Star, has gained 400,000 readers since January 2000.