AstraZeneca to develop new drugs to beat chronic diseases

Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has announced a research programme to develop a new generation of medicines to treat the genetic causes of many debilitating diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease and many cancers.

Since 2000 there were high hopes for the human genome project after the discovery of gene decoding, but 15 years on there has not been much progress.

The company has joined forces with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to develop new drugs using an emerging technique called Crispr to "snip out" specific disease genes in order to discover drugs.

Pallab Ghosh reports.