Cath Coombes is a commercially minded European and UK Chartered Patent Attorney with more than a decade of experience focusing on the life sciences field. She has particular interest in and considerable experience of securing and upholding patent protection relating to CRISPR technology, as applied to bacterial systems and, more recently, as a gene-editing tool.

The transformation of CRISPR systems from their natural function as part of adaptive bacterial immunity to a toolkit for carrying out site-specific modifications in eukaryotes has led to an explosion of new applications for such technology. Coombes provides a depth of knowledge from working in this highly contentious and constantly evolving field.