A SPOONFUL of sugar helps the medicine go down, but a new Oxford company is hoping to make vitamins and drugs more palatable by using vegetable fibres instead.

Oxford Nutrascience was the first company to float on the London Stock Exchange's Alternative Investment Market this year.

Since the flotation last month, shares in the company have jumped 86 per cent so that it is now worth almost £16m.

It owns the rights to a chocolate-flavoured calcium chew, on sale through Alliance Boots, where its chief executive Nigel Theobald, worked for 13 years.

He met co-founder Marcelo Bravo at Boots in Nottingham, but Mr Bravo then moved to work for Oxford University spin-off Oxford Advanced Surfaces.

The two founders raised £890,000 from the stockmarket, and Oxford Nutrascience is now one third owned by Ora Capital Partners, led by millionaire and part-time sheep farmer Richard Griffiths, founder of stockbroker Evolution Securities.

Mr Theobald said the flotation would provide enough funds for the next three years. By then, he hopes to break even, earning money by selling ‘Chewitabs’ and licensing technology to pharmaceutical companies to use in painkillers, indigestion preparations and cough and cold medicines.

It is funding research at Oxford University and hopes to develop a children's ibuprofen suspension and chewable allergy tablets. Mr Theobald said the company, based at Begbroke Science Park, hoped to capitalise on the growing market for more convenient and pleasant tasting medicines and supplements.

“Anyone with young children will know how much easier it is to get kids to take supplements if they enjoy them,” he said.

“We have a pipeline of new convenient and pleasant to take products that, combined with a rising trend towards self-medication, makes us confident of our ability to attract the attention of major brand owners.”

This summer, the company will launch what it claims to be the only fish-oil and multivitamin chew which doesn't taste of fish, under the brand name Ellactiva, plus a cranberry chew aimed at people with urinary tract problems. The market in ‘nutraceuticals’ is estimated to be almost £10bn worldwide.