Abstract
Cancer is among the leading causes of death worldwide. The key therapeutic modalities to treat cancer include chemo-therapy, hormonal therapy, targeted therapy, immuno-therapy and combination therapy. A number of chemical agents target DNA; they cause breaks, intercalation and cross-links to damage DNA thereby inhibiting cell proliferation. Cisplatin and taxol based chemotherapies are still the most used chemotherapeutic agents which is commonly used for treating many different tumor types, including head and neck, lung, testis, ovarian, cervix and breast. In spite of being in the pri-mary line of treatment modality, resistance to cisplatin is one the major limitation in cancer treatment. This is why the concept of combination therapies came into scene. Degradation of BRCA2 by hyperthermia causes abnormal localization of RAD51 which, in turn, attenuates the process of DNA repair via HR. Hyperthermia, in combination with PARP inhibitors is now a day is one of the best choices that is describes by several authors. This is an alternative combination to kill cancer cells causing minimum damage to normal cells.
This review explores why hyperthermia should be chosen as a better modality of treatment to treat cancer in combination with PARP inhibitors.
Key words: DNA damage repair, PARP, homologous recombination, hyperthermia, PARP inhibitors.