Abstract: AIM　To synthesize soybean isoflavones and their derivatives and to evaluate their antitumor activities preliminarily. METHODS　Polyhydric phenols and p-substituted phenylacetic acid derivatives were used as the major reactants to obtain the target compounds by multi-step synthesis. Their antitumor activities against hepatoma H22 tumor cell were tested by trypan blue exclusion method at the concentration of 50 μg.mL^-1. RESULTS　Thirteen deoxybenzoins and fourteen isoflavones were synthesized, five of them (1f～4f,1h) are new compounds. CONCLUSION　None of these compounds showed distinct antitumor activity against hepatoma H22 tumor cell, among these samples 1c and 1d gave the blue-stained ratio 10% and 5% at the concentration of 100 ng.mL^-1， respectively. Further study on the biological evaluation of the synthesized soybean isoflavones and their derivatives, is now underway.