Targeting the DNA damage response and DNA repair to combat cancer became an attractive hypothesis with the original discoveries made by Thomas Helleday, Alan Ashworth and colleagues that chemicals which inhibit the DNA damage sensor poly(ADP-ribose) (PAR) polymerase 1 (PARP-1) could be used to kill breast cancer cells that are defective in the tumor suppressor genes encoding homologous recombination (HR) repair proteins BRCA1 or BRCA2 (Bryant et al., 2005; Farmer et al., 2005). Here, BRCA1 is linked to cancer.