Serial entrepreneur Graham Hine, a former occupant of offices at Milton Park where he has already built up one business and sold it for a lot of money', is at it again.

This time the holder of a Cambridge physics PhD has acquired the rights to a so-called miracle' product, developed at the military establishment of Porton Down, to make garments completely waterproof - and oil and grease-proof too - to such an extraordinary degree that they never stain.

He set up the company, P2i, to exploit the product at the beginning of the year when he again took space at the park.

Now he already employs 14 people and has landed a contract with a German pharmaceutical company intending to use the product, marketed under the name ion-mask.' The product, based on a secret chemical, is applied to surfaces in a minutely-thin layer in the form of plasma which, Dr Hine explained, is sometimes called the fourth state of matter' - what ice, for instance, becomes when you go on heating it beyond its liquid and gas states of water and steam.

He said: "The article is placed in a vacuum chamber to be coated with the plasma."

Dr Hine added the company is still in the investment stage, money having been pumped into the innovative firm by major venture capitalists, including 3i.

He said: "Now we have signed a letter of intent with a major US producer of high-performance running shoes.

The shoes, to be made in China, will be coated with ion-mask and will be completely waterproof.

"We should soon start to make a lot of money."

One of the advantages of ion-mask is it also allows garments to which it is applied to remain 100 per cent breathable.

And the company also claims it is so stain resistant that, even if you poured red wine and oil over a coated silk scarf, it would still not get dirty.

Mr Hine said: "I shall bring the company to a stage where I can sell it in two or three years time - like I did before."

Last time he became a tenant at Milton Park it was as the boss of a company called Captor Sensors, which pioneered air-quality control equipment.

It sold well in the automotive industry, particularly to Renault, who used it to monitor air quality in their cars to ensure smelly air was not recirculated by their air-conditioning systems.

He sold up and spent some time acting as something of a business angel himself, investing in high-tech projects here and there, before hearing of the miracle plasma that is now ion-mask, being developed at Porton Down.

He is coy both about the name and nature of the chemical used in the product - though he says it is completely harmless, you could lick a garment coated with it - and about the amount of money so far invested, except to say the figure is several millions'.

He is pleased to be back at Milton Park, to which he commutes from his home in south Buckinghamshire.

He had been encouraged by the willingness of some of the highly-qualified staff he had employed at Captor Sensors to come back and work for him again.

The main target market sectors that Dr Hine, 51, has in his sights for ion-mask are: medical and bioscience; electronics; textiles and clothing; automotive and aerospace.

In the clothing field, some soldiers will doubtless remark that it is ironic that a product developed at the military establishment at Porton Down should be finding its way into the commercial market place when, as was recently written in a national newspaper, many of them are still having to buy their own waterproof liners for their backpacks.

But the fact remains that a product developed to protect the military from chemical attack may soon be helping all of us protect ourselves from everyday spillages, such as red wine.

The company maintains that applications for the new technology are almost limitless, and as transparent as the product itself, since it can be applied to any surface.

Could this even be the end of that ever clear and present danger of incapacitating a keyboard by coffee attack? Apparently yes!

And in the field of medicine, the company is already treating pipettes - the tiny tubes used by scientists for transfering measured quantities of liquid - and supplying them to a large German company.

So what is it like being a serial entrepreneur?

Dr Hine said: "Fun. Nerve-wracking at times."

Good luck to him. And here is hoping soldiers' equipment will soon benefit from the new technology!