Hematopoiesis is maintained by the activity of multipotent stem cells, which have the dual capacity to self-renew and to differentiate into all of the blood cell lineages. The major challenge of stem cells based regenerative therapy is to expand ex vivo the primitive compartment to increase transplantable stem cells number. The present study was designed to evaluate several culture systems for in vitro maintenance of umbilical cord blood stem cells. The influences of different growth conditions such as stromal feeder layer, cytokines supplement and placental conditioned medium (PCM) have been evaluated over a relatively short period of time on CD34(+) cell expansion and maintenance of clonogenic progenitors. When cells were expanded on feeder layer in the presence of added cytokines and PCM on average a 2.96-fold increase of CD34(+)CD71(-) and a 3.13-fold increase of CD34(+)HLA-DR(-) was observed. The total number of colony forming cells (35 +/- 2.65) indicated also that the yield of clonogenic progenitors obtained with a combination of all factors was two folds higher than each of these factors alone and ten time above control (3.67 +/- 2.52). In conclusion, the results of our study clearly show that the ex vivo expansion of hematopoietic progenitor cells obtained from human umbilical cord blood is dependent on controlled experimental conditions, which might be helpful when designing culture systems for clinical applications.