Although predictive roles for 53BP1 were unknown in cervical cancer, high expression levels of 53BP1 were associated with poor responses to cisplatin-based therapy in lung cancer.37 In analogy, 53BP1 was overexpressed specifically in those ovarian tumours that showed resistance to paclitaxel/carboplatin-based therapy.38 In addition, 53BP1 was frequently lost in hereditary breast cancers, where it was suggested to relieve the genomic instability caused by BRCA1 loss.17 The diversity of these results could be explained by differences in treatment modality between and even within these studies. The gene discussed is BRCA1; the disease is cervical carcinoma.