BRCA1 and ovarian cancer: Ovarian cancers have a high frequency of homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) due to germline or somatic mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, methylation of the BRCA1 or RAD51C promoter regions or other genetic alterations (Rigakos and Razis, 2012; Muggia and Safra, 2014).