Toxicity against tissue stem cells (TSCs) is a major problem in drug development and environmental health science. Despite their essential function in all human cellular tissues, the nature of tissue stem cells is not fully understood. The small fraction of stem cells in tissues and the lack of specific biomarkers for their quantification present a formidable challenge to developing tools for their study and assays that can identify stem cell-toxic agents.
Human Stem Cell Toxicology reveals TSC toxicity as a biomedical reality that is now well under siege by newly emerging ideas and technologies, despite these challenges. Chapters consider stem cell toxicity by environmental agents, pharmaceutical drug candidates, and marketed therapeutic medicines with adverse side effects. New insights to cellular, molecular, biochemical, and chemical mechanisms of human tissue stem cell toxicity are brought together. Experimental and theoretical treatments are of specific topics, including approaches to monitoring TSC function, newly discovered TSC types and TSC toxicity resistance mechanisms, are covered by expert authors.
This book informs and champions the continued development of innovative technologies to predict the TSC toxicity of compounds before their use, whether in patients or the environment, by addressing emerging new cell-based approaches and concepts for technical innovation. This publication will be a useful reference for postgraduate students and researchers working in toxicology, pharmaceutical science, tissue cell biology and stem cell biology.

James L. Sherley, M.D., Ph.D. is the founder and director of Asymmetrex, LLC. Launched in 2009 during his tenure as a Senior Scientist at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute (BBRI) from 2007 to 2013, originally as the Adult Stem Cell Technology Center, Asymmetrex has the mission of advancing tissue stem cell-based technologies to commercial development for biomedical and research applications. Dr Sherley joined the faculty of BBRI as a senior member of its research programs in Regenerative Biology and Cancer Biology to lead a new focus in developing adult stem cell-based technologies for advancing cellular medicine. Dr Sherley is a 1980 graduate of Harvard College, with a B.A. degree in biology; and he completed joint M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1988. After post-doctoral studies in cancer cell molecular biology at Princeton University, he joined the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia as a principal investigator in 1991. In 1998, he joined the faculty of the future Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he undertook research and teaching in the areas of cancer cell molecular biology, tissue stem cell bioengineering, and environmental health science until moving to BBRI in 2007. Dr Sherley's awards include 1993 Pew Biomedical Research Scholar, 2003 Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar in Aging Research, and 2006 NIH Director's Pioneer Award. He is also "PGP-10" in the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School.

Addressing Challenges to Progress in Human Stem Cell Toxicology Concepts and Practice; Alternative Methods in Haematopoietic Stem Cell Toxicology; High-throughput Screening of Toxic Chemicals on Neural Stem Cells; The Role of Catecholamines in Stem Cell Mobilisation; Toxicological Risk Assessment - Proposed Assay Platform Using Stem and Progenitor Cell Differentiation in Response to Environmental Toxicants; Current Developments in the Use of Human Stem Cell Derived Cardiomyocytes to Examine Drug-induced Cardiotoxicity; Pesticides and Hematopoietic Stem Cells; Epigenetic Impact of Stem Cell Toxicants; Metakaryotic Cancer Stem Cells are Constitutively Resistant to X-Rays and Chemotherapeutic Agents, but Sensitive to Many Common Drugs; Distributed Stem Cell Kinetotoxicity: A New Concept to Account for the Human Carcinogenicity of Non-genotoxic Environmental Toxicants; Cancer Stem Cells as Therapeutic Targets