Although tissue stem cells are essential for the maintenance, renewal, and repair of vertebrate organs and tissues, previously, the simple act of counting them has not been possible. For more than a half-century, progress in tissue stem cell research and medicine has been undermined by the lack of a means to determine tissue stem cell number. In particular, a major unmet need for stem cell transplantation medicine has been a way to quantify the specific dosage of tissue stem cell treatments. The counting problem persists because no biomarkers are known that identify tissue stem cells specifically, without also counting their more abundant committed progenitor progeny cells. Here, we describe integration of principles of tissue stem cell asymmetric self-renewal kinetics with computational simulation to achieve specific and accurate counting of therapeutic tissue

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