Carriers of heterozygous mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 are strongly predisposed to breast and ovarian cancers. Cancers arising in these individuals have consistently lost the wild-type allele during tumour progression, and are therefore deficient in BRCA1 or BRCA2 function. Both BRCA1 and BRCA2 proteins have been implicated in the repair of double-strand DNA breaks by homologous recombination. This functional role in DNA repair could be exploited in the treatment of BRCA-deficient cancers by targeting the tumours with drugs that create DNA damage highly reliant on BRCA1 or BRCA2 for repair.