Pei named world orthopaedics expert in cartilage research

Ming Pei, M.D., Ph. D., has been named a world expert in cartilage research by Expertscape. They report Pei is in the top 0.1% of scholars in the world who have written medical literature about cartilage in the past decade.

Pei is a professor in the West Virginia University School of Medicine Department of Orthopaedics and Division of Exercise Physiology and this is the third time he has received this recognition.

Pei’s lab focuses on the investigation of cell-matrix interaction and attempts to explore/engineer an ideal matrix to rejuvenate adult stem cells’ stemness. Achieving this goal will benefit future stem cell-based musculoskeletal tissue engineering and regeneration, particularly for cartilage regeneration.

“Cartilage defects occur often in the elderly population and tend to cause osteoarthritis if no treatment is received. Current treatments in the clinic can relieve patients’ symptoms but fail to repair cartilage functionally and biologically,” explained Pei. “Adult stem cells are a promising cell source for cartilage tissue engineering and regeneration, which needs a large quantity of high-quality stem cells. However, a long-term ex vivo expansion of stem cells can cause cell senescence where the cells lose their proliferation and differentiation potentials.”

Since joining the department in 2005, Pei’s work has been supported by the AO Foundation, Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Through collaboration with principal investigators across the country, Pei’s lab has been published more than 97 times in his area of interest in various medical publications.

Expertscape is a database that objectively ranks people and institutions by their expertise in more than 27,000 biomedical topics. It examines all medical publications indexed in the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE database and then experts are ranked by both the quality and quantity of their publications.