Dehua Pei has been named a 2025 Distinguished Scholar!

 The Distinguished Scholar Award honors six faculty members who demonstrate scholarly activity, research or creative works which represent exceptional achievements in their fields and who have brought distinction to themselves and Ohio State. The Distinguished Scholar Awards are among the highest annual honors Ohio State bestows on a faculty member in recognition of outstanding scholarly activity, research or creative works.

Dehua has been an international leader in developing cell-penetrating macrocyclic peptides. The Pei group made major breakthroughs in understanding and enabling the membrane transport of biomolecules, which not only solved a longstanding mystery in cell biology, but also made intracellular biologics a reality. The latter has the potential to address the ~80% of drug targets that are undruggable by current drugs. Armed with mechanistic knowledge about membrane transport through the vesicle budding mechanism, Prof. Pei’s team subsequently designed two families of cell-penetrating molecules of unprecedented efficiencies. These discoveries led to a number of patents and companies, one of the most notable Entrada Therapeutics. Very recently, the Pei team engineered a novel family of cell-permeable protein domains called membrane translocation domains (MTDs). MTDs can be used to effectively deliver any soluble protein into the cell as a research tool or therapeutic. MTDs are have already served as the foundation of two startup companies, Permeasis Therapeutics and Scioto AgriTech.

Congratulations, Dehua!