China successfully developed domestic vancomycin in 1968, not much later than western countries. At that time, as the largest antibiotic production base in China, Huabei Pharmaceutical Factory, after more than two years' efforts, finally succeeded in fermenting vancomycin with domestic strains, and successfully extracted vancomycin industrial-grade products from the fermentation broth, thus filling the gap of domestic new glycopeptide antibiotics. Since then, vancomycin, as a new clinical antibiotic, has been formally used to treat various drug-resistant bacterial diseases in domestic clinical medicine.
However, after 13 years of use, the technicians of China Institute for the Control of Pharmaceutical and Biological Products of the Ministry of Health unexpectedly found that the titer of domestic vancomycin standard was 10% higher than that of imported vancomycin. This phenomenon has attracted great attention of domestic antibiotic experts, who have redefined the molecular structure of domestic vancomycin by using the advanced proton spectrum-nuclear magnetic resonance method, and finally determined that the vancomycin developed in China should be "demethylvancomycin". Unfortunately, the awareness of patent protection of China enterprises was not strong at that time. Vancomycin produced in China has been identified by experts as a new product of "norvancomycin" completely different from western vancomycin, but it has not been patented in developed countries such as the United States and Britain. In turn, Lilly Company of the United States applied for a number of patents for norvancomycin in the Chinese Patent Office and the patent offices of western countries such as the United States. But so far, Lilly's norvancomycin has not been put into industrial production, so there is no substantial threat to our products.
Although the patent of norvancomycin invented by China was taken away by American companies, Huabei Pharmaceutical Factory has been insisting on continuous technical transformation of its products and investing huge sums of money to improve its production process. By 2000, it has reached the production scale with an annual output of 4 tons of raw materials. Later, in 2002, North China Pharmaceutical Factory transferred the norvancomycin strain to Zhangjiakou Great Wall Pharmaceutical Factory in Hebei Province. After several years of trial production, the annual production capacity of norvancomycin in Great Wall Pharmaceutical Factory has reached about 3 tons, which is close to that of North China Pharmaceutical Factory. It is estimated that the annual output of norvancomycin in China is about 7~8 tons.