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Welcome to the Ritty Lab Homepage

We are located at the Penn State University College of Medicine. Click here for more details: Ritty Lab:contact

We are primarily interested in connective tissue tumors - tumors of mesenchymal origin (sarcoma). We have multiple ongoing projects that address metastatic mechanisms, sarcoma tumor typing and grade identification, and tumor penetration of chemotherapeutic agents. Please see our Research Page for greater details.

Specifically, we are investigating two metastatic mechanisms of osteosarcoma. First, we hypothesize that specific integrins mediate metastatic invasion of tissues, and that loss or overexpression of an integrin receptor therefore alters metastatic potential. Second, osteosarcoma cells alter their expression of matrix metalloproteinases after attachment to extracellular matrix proteins. We hypothesize this feedback loop mechanism influences osteosarcoma metastatic ability. We employ a variety of cellular and molecular methods to investigate our hypotheses.  Click here for more details: