Yesterday, the National Cancer Institute stated that the “number of breast cancers suffered by American women will increase by about 50 percent by 2030,” according to this piece in the Washington Post.

According to this report by Fast Company, a new at-home test developed by former Google staffers wants to give more power to women earlier on to detect the genes that may cause the disease.

“Color Genomics, a new company founded by ex-Googlers Othman Laraki and Elad Gil, along with pathologist Taylor Sittler and biologist Nish Bhat, hopes to make this type of genetic testing more affordable,” Fast Company reports. “Their company’s Color Test, out today, is a mail-order, at-home saliva test that costs $249 and tests 19 genes connected to breast and ovarian cancer, including BRCA1 and BRCA2.”

Mutations in those genes can indicate that a woman is more susceptible to developing breast or ovarian cancer. If a woman knows she’s in one of the greater risk groups, the hopes are that her and her doctor will be more vigilant, therefore increasing odds for early detection and treatment.

How does the test work? You purchase the kit online (it must be doctor-ordered), provide a saliva sample and mail it in. You receive your results online after it has been reviewed by a doctor. You can then talk to a Color counselor about the results, and they can share it with your doctor, too.

Testing for the cancer-causing genes has been given a large platform recently by Angelina Jolie, who has been tested and undergone surgeries to prevent cancer from forming. But that testing before was very expensive and out of the reach for most women.

“We went through the process end to end, from receiving the sample at the lab to analysis, and automated every single step that before involved a lot of manual labor by clinicians,” Laraki told Fast Co. about how Color reduced the cost of the test. “What we’ve done is created a process that makes those same PhDs able to do that work in a much more efficient way.”

The entire team behind the Color test is pretty impressive. They have assembled a crew of engineers from Google, Twitter, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley and Caltech to build their platform, according to their site, as well as consulted with top medical professionals in the field, including two leading researchers from the University of Washington. Dr. Mary-Claire King, who discovered BRCA1, and Dr. Tom Walsh, a leading cancer geneticist, both sit on their scientific advisory board.

Insurance does not accept Color as of this time, but at around $250 a pop, it would probably be cheaper than being tested the old way anyway. Hopefully, insurance companies will get on board and support this tool in the arsenal for earlier cancer detection.