SEATTLE - They call it tumor painting.

It's a futuristic idea that might not be far from reality and it's being developed in Seattle.

The concept is to mark or paint the areas where cancer exists, so surgeons can cut away only the tumor.

This innovative approach was discovered at the Hutch in Dr. James Olson's lab.

"I think it is a breakthrough technology," Olson said. "If it works anywhere as well in humans as it does in animals, it's going to be phenomenal. It will change the way that we take out all kinds of cancers."

This extraordinary breakthrough came out of clinical practice at Children's Hospital. The original idea focused on how to perform most effective surgeries on pediatric brain tumors.

"So Rich Ellenbogen, who is the chairman of neurosurgery at Children's Hospital and the UW, challenged our lab to come with a way to make cancer cells light up so that the surgeons could actually see them and distinguish them from the normal tissue around them," Olson said.

Now this is where Dr. Olson and his team's project gets a little tricky. Olson's lab went to work on finding a molecule that would cling only to the cancer, and nothing else. It turns out their answer existed thousands of miles away. It was crawling across the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East.

"We settled on a compound called chloratoxin, which is a peptide which is a small protein that comes from a scorpion toxin," Olson said.

The results in the lab have been nothing short of amazing.

Even more exciting this technique has the potential to be used for all sorts of cancer surgeries, not just brain tumors.