DM, MMed(INT), PhD, MRCP(London), PD, FHEA, PGcert

Training and education

After graduating as a doctor of medicine from the University of Graz, Austria in 1990, Dr Haitchi went on to train as an emergency physician and general practitioner in Austria. From 1996 to 2001 he completed his specialist training in internal medicine with a special interest in respiratory medicine at Tygerberg Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa. In 2000 he graduated with a Master in medicine from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. After moving to England in 2001 he completed his PhD at the University of Southampton in 2008, and in 2009 he received a postgraduate certificate in education and became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Since 2014 he has been a ‘Privatdozent’ (PD, Priv. Doz.) for pneumology at the Paracelsus Medical University (PMU) in Salzburg Austria.

Experience

Dr Haitchi is an associate professor in respiratory medicine and clinician scientist within the faculty of medicine at the University of Southampton. He is an honorary consultant physician at UHS, seeing patients with difficult to treat and severe asthma, in the asthma clinic.

He is also the lead the of the Respiratory Clinical Studies Forum (CSF) within the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre (BRC).

Dr Haitchi is the lead for the young asthma patient clinic for transitional patients. He sees young asthma patients, aged 15 to 18, together with his paediatric colleagues in the paediatric asthma clinics to enable a better transition into his young asthma patient and adult asthma clinic.

Awards and prizes

Dr Haitchi held a prestigious Medical Research Council (MRC) clinician scientist fellowship from 2010 to 2014 in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton. This MRC fellowship took him from 2010 to 2011 to the USA, where he did research as a visiting scientist and scholar in Professor Whitsett's pulmonary biology lab in Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Centre.
In 2014 Dr Haitchi was awarded a P.D. (Privatdozent for Pneumology) as part of his ‘Habilitation’at the Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg, Austria.
Since 2003 Dr Haitchi has been awarded multiple travel fellowships/awards to different international respiratory meeting with the latest in 2022: travel award from Allergy & Asthma Network for the International Collaborative Asthma Network (ICAN) meeting, San Francisco, USA

Research

Dr Haitchi and his research group at the University of Southampton have been leading pioneering asthma research. They have found that the structural changes of the airways, associated with allergic asthma, are initiated by a gene called ADAM33, making the airways more susceptible to allergic airway inflammation (JCI-Insight 2016). This challenges conventional thinking that allergic airway inflammation occurs first and brings about the structural changes in the airways of people with asthma.

“While we have good asthma reliever and controller therapies, we have no therapies that prevent or reverse asthma. Blocking the asthma gene ADAM33 may prevent or reverse twitchiness and inflammation of asthma. Therefore, our future aim is to develop new ADAM33 blocking agents as a novel asthma therapy in collaboration with Jonathan Watts group at the University of Massachusetts, USA.”

His group is also studying the impact of maternal allergic asthma and being overweight during pregnancy on asthma in the babies as part of the Maternal Environment in Pregnancy (MEP) study.

Publications

Dr Haitchi is also a co-Investigator in the real-life longitudinal Wessex Asthma Cohort of Difficult Asthma (WATCH) study.

Dr Haitchi’s research has been funded by: AAIR charity, Asthma UK, British Lung Foundation, British Medical Association, EPSRC, Medical Research Council and Medical Research Foundation.

Fong WCG et al. The Detrimental Clinical Associations of Anxiety and Depression with Difficult Asthma Outcomes. J Pers Med. 2022 Apr 26;12(5):686.doi:

Pubmed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35629109/

Fong WCG et al. Asthma did not increase in-hospital Covid-19 related mortality in a tertiary UK hospital. Clin Exp Allergy. 2021 Feb 24.

Pubmed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33626216/

E.R. Davies et al. Soluble ADAM33 initiates airway remodelling to promote susceptibility for allergic asthma in early life. JCI Insight. 2016 Jul 21;1(11). pii: e87632.

Full text: https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/87632

Links to research profiles:

University of Southampton: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5wzsfr/doctor-hans-michael-haitchi

NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre: https://www.southamptonbrc.nihr.ac.uk/our-people

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8603-302X

Contact

You can contact Dr Hans Michael Haitchi via his secretary Tina Fennell on 023 8120 8790 or send her an email.