MRE11 and neoplasm: Our findings suggest that MRE11 inhibition may pose an attractive therapeutic target in oral squamous cell cancer, but potential problems exist in balancing the complexity of altering a potentially beneficial (preservation of genome integrity in the normal phenotype) and potentially maladaptive response (abrogation of the DDR to clastogenic therapies and endogenous tumor replication stress), together with the current paucity of suitable clinical antagonists, real-time functional DDR assays and noninvasive methods of MRE11 quantification.