Cisplatin Damage: Are DNA Repair Proteins Saviors or Traitors to the Cell?

Help or hindrance? Two recent publications corroborated the involvement of poly(adenosine diphosphate–ribose)polymerase (PARP) and DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK) in the cellular response to cisplatin treatment. However, the obtained data and their interpretation reveal a more complex outcome than is perhaps intuitively expected, in that these mammalian DNA repair proteins may harm rather than help the cells (see schematic representation).