Breast cancer survivor, Renata Gortan, lives a busy life.
The young writer spends most of her time running around town researching features on culture, art and new openings.
But she says her busy schedule came to a dramatic halt after a routine doctor's check-up, last year.
"I said 'oh, by the way I feel these lumps'. Ah my G-P checked, she couldn't feel any lumps, but she said just to be on the safe side, go an do an ultrasound."
Doctors found two lumps - one was cancerous.
She had surgery to remove it, followed by chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
"It's what my oncologist called the Rolls Royce of cancer treatment, because I was young, and it was aggressive and she said my body could handle it, so they just hit me with everything basically."
The 32-year-old had no family history of breast cancer and says the diagnosis was hard to accept.
"It was a shock and it was distressing and it was like, 'why me? why has this happened to me?"
Scientists may be on the verge of answering her question.
An international team went through 3 billion genetic code sequences - from hundreds of patients around the world - and identified 93 genes which can mutate to trigger the disease.
The report author, Dr Serena Nik-Zainal from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK, says the study took six years to complete.
"Getting a comprehensive collection of information, including the mutations that are causing cancer, tells us something about why that cancer is going wrong, why that cell is turning into a cancer cell. If you can understand that, you can understand the causes of the cancer, and then you can treat it a lot better."
Scientists say the data could lead to the widespread use of treatments tailored to the individual patient.
Deborah Maguire is a breast care and clinical nurse at St Vincent's Private Hospital.
She says some targeted treatment is being used - and it's a much better option for many patients because cancer can affect people differently.
"Less side effects, obviously less side effects, better outcomes and a more promising future. If patients are having surgery then chemotherapy, then radiation and then a hormone tablet their side effects could be more severe than patients just having radiation."
It could still be at least a decade until patients can get any new drugs.
Even then, cancer has ways of developing resistance to new therapies.
But this research is a huge step in the right direction and could one day help improve the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of patients.
Almost 16-thouand cases of breast cancer were diagnosed in Australia last year alone.
Survivor, Renata Gortan, hopes the research will help scientists discover how to prevent the disease in the first place.
"I mean if I have a child, I have a 50 per cent chance of passing that gene on to them. This research will come in handy for them because they will be able to get tested early, and hopefully, hopefully science can do something to stop the gene from mutating."
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