Role of the microbiota in the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 disease in hospitalized patients – MICROBIOCOVID

Patients hospitalized for COVID-19 may need intensive care (e.g. mechanical ventilation) during hospitalization. Some risk factors are already known (e.g. sex, comorbidities, initial clinical presentation inflammatory cytokines), but better targeting of such patients is still needed, at least because existing risk factors are not strong enough to provide an accurate prediction. Care organization would benefit for such a predictive tool.
Oropharyngeal and gut microbiota could fill a significant gap in predictive performances. We therefore propose to take advantage of the French-COVID cohort and sample 200 patients (oropharyngeal and rectal swab) admitted in infectious disease department at Bichat Hospital and at high risk of needing intensive care during hospitalization. We plan to perform metagenomic sequencing and bioinformatic analysis of these samples to characterize the diversity of bacterial species present in the oropharynx and the gut and to identify new factors associated with the need for intensive care. Aside metagenomic analyses, we will perform semi-quantitative cultures of the oropharyngeal and gut microbiota to identify and quantify pathogens in order to predict the risk of bacterial infections in COVD-19 patients.
For patients transferred in intensive care unit, we will to perform another series of samples to better characterize the evolution of microbiota during mechanical ventilation and identify factors associated with the risk of developing a ventilator-associated pneumonia.