Adenovirus Based Coronavirus Vaccine Being Tested

by TVR Staff

Published March 5, 2020 | Vaccination, Future Vaccines

Greffex, Inc., a privately-held, multinational genetic engineering company headquartered in Houston, Texas has announced that it has completed development of a vaccine for the COVID-19 coronavirus. The vaccine will now proceed to testing in laboratory animals under supervision by the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and regulatory agencies in China.¹

Greffex Got $18.9M from NIH

In September 2019, Greffex received an $18.9 million contract from the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop products targeting infectious diseases. The funds were used to develop the company’s new coronavirus vaccine.¹
According to the New York Post, Greffex CEO John Price said that his company’s experimental coronavirus vaccine is not a live attenuated vaccine. Instead, Greffex used an adenovirus vector to create the genetically engineered vaccine. Adenovirus vectors are also to create cancer gene therapies.¹
Price said:

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? And that’s where we have an edge as well on the other companies that are out there.²

Greffex officials have stated that if the vaccine is approved by the FDA, it will distribute the vaccine for free to other countries.²
Greffex has been developing vaccines for Ebola, Avian Influenza, Anthrax, Dengue Fever, Swine Influenza, H7N9 Influenza, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and the Universal Influenza Vaccine.³

WHO Testing HIV Drugs to Treat COVID-2019

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced that preliminary results from two clinical trials testing potential treatments for the COVID-19 coronavirus are expected by the end of March.⁴ One trial combines Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) drugs Lopinavir and Ritonavir, while the other is testing U.S.-based biotech Gilead Sciences’ antiviral Remdesivir that is used to treat Ebola.⁴

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