The natural product, paclitaxel, has made tremendous contributions in supplying the arsenal of anticancer therapeutics, and was FDA approved for clinical use in 1992. In order to design simplified analogs, the conformation that paclitaxel adopts when binding to tubulin has been the subject of ongoing studies. Much evidence has led to a T-taxol proposal and a C3' constrained analog has been designed and synthesized as a test of this conformation. In the search for more active analogs, a number of modifications have been made to paclitaxel by other researchers. However, the nature of the alterations, and combinations thereof, have not been exhausted. To this end, synthesis of northern hemisphere B-ring analogs is underway.