PARP1 and cancer: A relevant example of synthetic lethality quickly moving to clinical application is the use of poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors for the treatment of BRCA-associated cancers. BRCA1 and BRCA2 are tumor suppressor genes encoding proteins that play important roles for DNA double-stranded break (DSB) detection for the homologous recombination (HR) repair pathway [6, 7].