Bates notes that patients on combination therapy had improved "[disease] progression-free survival, and overall survival" as compared to patients treated with traditional drugs alone. Bates is optimistic about the promise of combining PARP inhibitors with existing cancer drugs. She says that the results of these clinical trials "have provided proof of principle in achieving synthetic lethality" with PARP-inhibiting drugs and that treatments combining novel PARP inhibitors with traditional chemotherapeutic drugs have the potential to vanquish BRCA-associated breast and ovarian cancers.