A Texas-based genetic engineering company is claiming to have a vaccine for the new coronavirus.

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Greffex Inc. CEO told the Houston Business Journal that his company completed the vaccine this week, and it will now move on to animal testing as required by the U.S. government.

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"The trick in making a vaccine is: Can you scale the vaccine that you’ve made to be able to make a certain number of doses? Can you test that vaccine quickly and efficiently? And then can you get it into patients?" Price told Houston's KHOU 11. "And that’s where we have an edge as well on the other companies that are out there."

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If the vaccine is approved by the government, Greffex will distribute the vaccine to other countries for free, Price added.

Price said Greffex did not use a living or dead version of the actual virus that originated in Wuhan, China, to create the vaccine -- a popular method used by some scientists to create an immunity to a virus, like the flu vaccine. Instead, Greffex uses adenovirus-based vector vaccines, meaning they are genetically engineered.

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The vaccine was developed as the result of an $18.9 million contract that the National Institute of Health’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases gave to Greffex in September 2019 in an effort to fight infectious diseases, the Business Journal reported.

So far, 26 countries outside China have reported more than 1,000 coronavirus cases to the World Health Organization (WHO) as of Friday. China has reported more than 2,100 deaths and 74,675 total cases to WHO.

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