PARP-1 inhibitors and radiotherapy sensitivity: future prospects for therapy?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

SUMMARY Despite the efficacy of multimodality treatment for women with breast cancer, sustained locoregional control remains a significant issue. Efforts to identify effective targeted therapies for treatment of these patients have intensified in recent years. The PARP family of proteins represents one potential target. PARP-1 is a DNA repair enzyme that plays a critical role in base excision repair, homologous recombination, nonhomologous end joining and transcriptional regulation. In this review, we discuss the rationale for using PARP-1 inhibitors clinically, the role of PARP-1 in DNA damage repair and the potential clinical utility of using PARP-1 inhibitors as a radiosensitization strategy. We will also review the most relevant clinical trials using various PARP-1 inhibitors and the future of biomarker development to predict response to PARP-1 inhibition.