Unlocking the potential of hyperthermia in cancer therapy by harnessing drug repurposing and target discovery

Hyperthermia is receiving increased clinical interest for the treatment of a wide range of cancer types. The efficacy of this modality could potentially be improved through technical advancements and a further understanding of hyperthermia’s biological effects. Specifically, the development of high-throughput techniques and the availability of big data during the last decades has created avenues to systematically find novel hyperthermia-based treatment regimens or improve existing ones. The work described in this thesis primarily revolves around this concept. We report on compounds that have the capacity to sensitize cancer cells to hyperthermia, thereby improving the efficacy of the treatment, and present a setup that provides a well-controlled basis for performing large scale animal experiments, aiding in the future validation of these and other drug candidates in a clinically relevant setup.