The synthetic biology matures to promote the heterologous biosynthesis of the well-known drug paclitaxel that is one of the most important and active chemotherapeutic agents for the first-line clinical treatment of cancer.  This review focuses on the construction and regulation of the biosynthetic pathway of paclitaxel intermediates in both Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  In particular, the review also features the early efforts to design and overproduce taxadiene and the bottleneck of scale fermentation for producing the intermediates.