Abstract: The present invention relates to a method of ex vivo amplification of neonatal T cells from umbilical cord blood which comprises obtaining light density mononuclear cells from a sample of umbilical cord blood and then culturing said light density mononuclear cells in a serum-deprived culture medium supplemented with various cytokine combinations. Particularly, there are reported the effects exerted by cytokine combinations including stem cell factor (SCF), interleukin-7, interleukin-4 and interleukin-2, on the amplification of T cells from cord blood mononuclear cells cultured for 10-11 days under serum-deprived conditions. Of all the combinations investigated, SCF plus interleukin-7 sustained the best fold increase (FI) of total nucleated cells (FI=6.4±1.17), amplifying preferentially CD4+ over CD8+ T cell subsets (FI=4.72±0.79 vs 2.73±1.2, respectively, p<0.05). The addition of interleukin-2 to this combination did not significantly increase the total number of cells generated (FI=7.4±2.