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Beyond BRCA

Markers beyond BRCA to identify patients who could benefit from PARP inhibitors

November 29, 2018 8:16 PM UTC

Researchers at the German Cancer Research Center have identified synthetic lethal markers beyond BRCA that expand the pool of patients who may benefit from PARP inhibitors and other compounds targeting DNA damage repair pathways.

In a paper published in Nature Communications this month, the team showed that inactivation of DNA repair factors essential for homologous recombination or non-homologous end joining, including BRCA2, x-ray repair cross complementing 4 (XRCC4) and DNA ligase 4 (LIG4), leads to frequent complex genome rearrangements in brain tumors. ...