About
Collaborators: Olivier Join-Lambert & François Gravey (CHU Caen); Philippe Glaser (Institut Pasteur); Jean-Ralph Zahar (Hopital Avicenne, AP-HP); Elizabeta Vergu, Beatrice Laroche (Inrae); Jean-Louis Herrmann (Univ. Versailles Saint Quentin, AP-HP)
Funding: ANR
Summary: Gram-negative multi-drug resistant bacteria (MDRB) spread and outbreaks have steadily increased in hospitals worldwide, becoming an international public health priority. By leveraging unique collections of data based on longitudinal follow-up of patients in three different Intensive Care Units (Caen Hospital, Avicenne hospital) to monitor the acquisition of resistant bacteria and potential risk factors, our aim is to characterize and model the factors that shape the acquisition and transmission of MDRB in these settings.
Data have been collected over 6 months in 3 ICUs. It consists of weekly rectal swabs for which genomic analysis of colonizing MDR strains and of microbiota will be performed, clinical information on patients and wrads, and information on the dynamics of proximities between individuals collected through the deployment of log-sensors on site.
By combining epidemiology, genomics, ecology and mathematical modelling, we assess the role of within host bacterial dynamics – in particular plasmid transfer and and interaction between MDRB and the gut microbiome –, antibiotic exposure and human-to-human transmission, in the spread of MDRB. This includes (1) analyzing MDRB acquisitions in hospitals using genomics and metagenomics, (2) developing advanced multi-scale hypothesis-driven modeling and statistical inference tools that specifically formalize phenomena and integrate data at the genetic, ecological (within-host) and epidemiological (population) scales to characterize transmissions; and (3) exploiting model simulations to suggest new optimized control strategies.
