Last week, as experts assembled at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva to discuss the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, there was a glaring absence in the public discourse: an accurate assessment of the U.S. government’s capacity to produce ZMapp, one of the experimental drugs under discussion for speeded approval. The drug, a cocktail of three monoclonal antibodies that has now been used in the treatment of at least seven Ebola patients, five of whom survived, has the potential to be an exceptional therapy against the virus. But the world’s supply is currently exhausted, and production of even several dozen additional doses of the drug remains months away.

But the U.S. government could in fact produce an extraordinary amount of the drug in a relatively short timeframe. A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program, launched in 2006 and led by Michael Callahan, an infectious disease doctor affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital, wildly accelerated the rate at which vaccines and monoclonal antibodies like ZMapp can be produced. Callahan’s project was known as AMP, for Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals, and, later, as Blue Angel. It pitted small biotech firms against one another, each competing to produce therapeutic agents in creative and relatively untested ways : DARPA’s original call for proposals suggested fungal fermentation, arthropod-transections, and aquatic or terrestrial plants as potential platforms. Tobacco plants eventually proved to be the most effective means of production.

In each round of the experiment, genetic code for a vaccine or drug was delivered to participants via email. Each phase, termed “Live Fire Tests,” demanded production of a logarithmically increasing amount of the assigned vaccine or antibody in an ever decreasing time frame. The final iteration of the challenge, which two firms successfully completed in 2012, demanded the production of 3 million doses of a vaccine in twelve weeks at the cost of no more than $1 per dose. That scale of production was unimaginable to those outside of DARPA before the experiment began.

Kentucky Biopharmaceuticals, the current manufacturer of ZMapp, was one the firms that participated in the later phases of the AMP/Blue Angel program. It was not rated as one of the highest-performing platforms, according to those close to the experiment. It did, though, benefit significantly from Pentagon funding, as did a number of other companies.

The president of one of the premier AMP/Blue Angel platforms, speaking on the condition of anonymity last week, told me that his firm could produce tens of thousands of doses of ZMapp within months and 3 million doses of the ZMapp within a year.