Dr Jo-Anne de la Mare is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Bioinformatics at Rhodes University and President of the South African Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She obtained her PhD in Biochemistry from Rhodes University in 2012. As the Principal Investigator of the Female Cancers Research at Rhodes University (FemCR2U) group, her research focuses on preclinical drug discovery for female cancers including triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) and cervical cancer. The development of drug resistance models for triple negative breast cancer and cervical cancer cell lines from South African women is funded by National Research Foundation CSUR and MRC-EC-SHIP programme grants and is geared towards developing more relevant disease models for the African context. Genetic characterization of the cervical cancer lines aims to identify novel driver mutations for these diseases that may have diagnostic and prognostic relevance, while characterization of resistance models aims to shed light on the mechanisms of drug resistance in triple negative breast cancer.