- Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, NYU Grossman School of Medicine / NYU Langone Health
Dr. Marlena Habal is an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist at NYU Langone Health. She earned her medical degree from the University of Toronto, where she also completed her internal medicine residency and cardiology fellowship, before pursuing advanced clinical training in heart failure and cardiac transplantation at Columbia University Medical Center. She subsequently completed a research fellowship at the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology, where she investigated the role of T cells in cardiac allograft vasculopathy.
Dr. Habal’s research sits at the intersection of transplant cardiology and immunology, with a focus on humoral alloimmunity — the antibody-mediated immune responses that threaten long-term graft survival. She is the Principal Investigator of a multicenter clinical trial evaluating belatacept with gradual calcineurin inhibitor (CNI) withdrawal in heart transplantation, aiming to reduce pathogenic humoral alloimmunity while minimizing CNI-induced nephrotoxicity. Her laboratory investigates how alloreactive B cells escape contemporary immunosuppression to sustain persistent humoral alloimmune responses, with the broader goal of developing targeted strategies to steer the immune system toward tolerance.
At NYU, Dr. Habal leads a humoral desensitization program dedicated to the care of immunologically complex transplant patients, integrating her translational research directly into clinical practice.
