Chloroeremomycin was discovered by Eli Lilly in the 1980s. In the 1990s, researchers at Eli Lilly developed biphenyl-chloroeremomycin, now known as oritavancin, as a functionalized derivative of chloroeremomycin to combat rising antibacterial resistance to vancomycin. The chloroeremomycin gene cluster was sequenced by van Wageningen et al in 1998. After the publication, many groups expressed the genes and conducted experiments to understand how chloroeremomycin and, by extension, vancomycin are biosynthesized.