Dr. Neal S. Kleiman is the medical director of the cardiac catheterization laboratories at the Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center at Houston Methodist Hospital and a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. He has special interests in angioplasty, stenting, coronary artery diseases and interventional cardiology.

His research lies in the relationship between angioplasty, stenting and clotting. His laboratory, recognized nationally as a select site for platelet research, examines the effects of antiplatelet therapy, the use of medications to prevent platelets from clumping and blood from clotting in patients with coronary artery disease who undergo angioplasty procedures. Kleiman has been the principal investigator and/or collaborating investigator in more than 100 studies and multi-center trials related to arterial thrombosis, the formation of blood clots in the arteries, clotting and angioplasty, which have altered the management of patients with chest pain undergoing catheterization.

After receiving his medical degree from Columbia University in New York, Kleiman completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, as well as a fellowship in cardiology.

Kleiman has published over 150 manuscripts, book chapters and abstracts. His work has appeared in such publications as the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Annals of Thoracic Surgery, Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology, Circulation, The American College of Cardiology and The European Heart Journal. He is on the editorial board of The Journal of Interventional Cardiology, Circulation, The American Heart Journal and The Journal of Thrombosis and Thrombolysis.

Kleiman is a member of numerous professional organizations including The American Heart Association Council on Clinical Cardiology and Council on Thrombosis, and he is a fellow of The American College of Cardiology and the Society for Coronary Angiography and Interventions.

Dr. Kleiman’s research effort since joining the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine and subsequently at the Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center has been focused on acute coronary syndromes and coronary interventions. The bulk of this effort has been in the design, management, and execution phases of clinical trials in these two fields, on both the single center (at Houston Methodist Hospital and Ben Taub General Hospital) and multicenter levels. As part of this effort, he has dedicated considerable time to serving on the steering committees of several dozen multicenter trials. Dr. Kleiman established the Applied Platelet Physiology Laboratory at Baylor, now at the Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center. Work in that laboratory has centered on two areas: providing supporting work in a large number of clinical trials that were complemented by nested mechanistic and pathophysiologic studies, and carrying out independent physiologic studies examining such issues as aspirin dosing, platelet activation during coronary interventions, individual responses to the activity of thienopyridines, and the relation of platelet turnover and COX-2 expression to aspirin sensitivity. The laboratory has also collaborated with other laboratories in the Texas Medical Center including Rice University’s Department of Bioengineering, Baylor’s Leukocyte Biology Laboratory, and most recently, the Molecular Genetics of Cardiovascular Diseases laboratory at Baylor and the stem cell group at MD Anderson Cancer Center. These collaborations have allowed the laboratory to expand its foci to include such investigations as the effects of P2Y12 inhibition and GP IIb/IIIa ligation on leukocyte rolling, leukocyte activation following GP IIb/IIIa administration, the role of platelet P-selectin on leukocyte membrane changes, and most recently the relation circulating endothelial precursor cells and coronary collateral vessels in patients with acute coronary syndromes.