Serial entrepreneur Bruce Savage has done it again. His Oxford University spin-out company has just won another £670,000 for the further development of a nasal spray against allergies such as hay fever, made from shrimp shells.

His company, CMP Therapeutics (CMPT), with its headquarters at the former USAF air base Heyford Park, is a pioneering a revolutionary new product that attacks the roots of allergies rather than just the symptoms, such as sneezing - unlike the products which you currently buy at the chemists.

The initials stand for Chitin Micro Particles, chitin being a chemical found in the spores of funghi (and also in the shells of shrimps) which his fellow director Peter Strong had discovered could tackle allergies when he was working at the Medical Research Council Immunobiology Unit at Oxford University.

Mr Strong's business plan for CMPT was a finalist in the business plan competition held at the Said Business School back in 2004. Presented to Swiss fund management company Inventages Venture Capital, the plan helped to win the company £3m through an introduction from Oxford Investment Opportunity Network (OION), of Cumnor Hill, now one of Europe's top business angel networks.

The initial million euros came the company's way back in December 2005, and now the venture has passed its first milestone by gaining approval from drug regulators to start clinical trials, attracting the next tranche of another million euros.

The story of how CMPT plans to bring the saving properties of chitin to market provides an insight into how modern innovation, particularly in the environs of a university city, works its magic. And Mr Savage is an inspiring figure on the scene, exuding the fun of entrepreneurship.

CMPT's first potential product, a nasal spray called Allermatic, uses the naturally-occurring polysaccharide derived from shrimp shells, to act as an immune enhancer by stimulating a natural anti-allergenic process in the body, without producing the adverse side-effects of conventional drugs.

Initial tests show that the compound works against a wide range of common pollen allergies such as house-mite allergy and allergy to cats.

Now CMPT will use funding from Inventages to take the product through clinical trials on patients with hay fever, starting next month.

All this is nothing new for Mr Savage. Back in 1991 he started a company called Cytocell in Banbury to make DNA testing kits designed to diagnose a wide range of diseases. He gained experience in spotting high-tech business opportunities after working as a consultant with Oxford University's technology transfer company Isis Innovation.

By 1994 he had also gained experience in raising money from Oxford Investment Opportunity Network, who found investors for Cytocell - a company which then moved to Banbury Business Park before being divided up and sold off.

Mr Savage said: "What I do basically is work with academics to get businesses started."

The first company he helped to fly was BioAnaLabs which took the research of Prof Geoff Hale, who had been lured from Cambridge to Oxford, to market. Isis helped Prof Hale to set up BioAnaLab, which uses drugs to exploit the body's own immune system to fight diseases, and Mr Savage looked for financial backing - and indeed found it, again through Oxford Investment Opportunity Network.

He said: "I left in September 2005 when it was time for the company to find a permanent chief executive. Unusually it appointed Prof Hale - and all credit to him. He has proved to be a pragmatic academic."

Obviously excited by the possibilities of CMPT, he said: "I knew this was likely to be a goer as soon as I met Peter Strong."

But the life of a high-tech entrepreneur is like riding a helter skelter, it seems. His efforts to help the Oxford scientist Baroness Greenfield with her neurology diagnostics company Enkephala - her fourth business venture - met with less success.

He said: "But the nature of academic collaborations means that the thing is by no means dead. The research goes on within the university and could come up again."

He was delighted when setting up BioAnaLab to have proper funding, having been forced to skimp in the early stages of Cytocell. But it seems his parsimony learned in those days has stuck when it comes to keeping down overheads.

Ring CMPT and you feel you are speaking to the switchboard at a large company. In fact it is the receptionist at Heyford Park who answers the telephone; the company itself consists only of Mr Savage, Mr Strong and a part-time book keeper.

"We are a virtual company." he said.

It seems that the route to market for Oxford academics is first to work with Isis Innovation and then with someone like Mr Savage, who can nurse them through take-off.

Allermatic is a timely invention of Mr Strong's - the incidence of allergic disease has been increasing at a phenomenal rate, with the World Health Organisation calling it the number one immuno-pathological problem. The number of people with allergies may well hit 50 per cent of us by 2015.

And how long before those of us who suffer from hay fever can wave goodbye to the debilitating nuisance, if Allermatic is successful in clinical trials? "Four or five years," said Mr Savage. In the meantime, he is already talking to major drug companies.