Recent studies have defined ALC1 as an attractive target for therapeutic intervention strategies in cancer as its inactivation sensitizes to clinical PARP inhibitors and confers synthetic lethality in homologous recombination-deficient cancer cells (Abbott et al., 2020; Blessing et al., 2020; Hewitt et al., 2021; Juhász et al., 2020; Verma et al., 2021). The gene discussed is PARP1; the disease is cancer.