Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more What would it be like to chat with health records the way one could with ChatGPT?  Initially posed by a medical student, this question sparked the development of ChatEHR at Stanford Health Care. Now in production, the tool accelerates chart reviews for emergency room admissions, streamlines patient transfer summaries and synthesizes information from complex medical histories.  In early pilot results, clinical users have experienced significantly sped-up information retrieval; notably, emergency physicians saw 40% reduced chart review time during critical handoffs, Michael A. Pfeffer, Stanford’s SVP and chief information and digital officer, said today in a fireside chat at VB Transform. This helps to decrease physician burnout while improving patient care, and builds upon decades of work medical facilities have been doing to collect and automate critical data.  “It’s such an exciting time in healthcare because we’ve been spending the last 20 years digitizing healthcare data and putting it into an electronic health record, but not really transforming it,” Pfeffer said in a chat with VB editor-in-chief Matt Marshall. “With the new large language model technologies, we’re actually starting to do that digital transformation.”  How ChatEHR helps reduce ‘pajama time,’ get back to real face-to-face interactions Physicians spend up to 60% of their time on administrative tasks rather than direct patient care. They often put in significant “pajama time,” sacrificing personal and family hours to complete administrative tasks outside of regular work hours. One of Pfeffer’s big goals is to streamline workflows and reduce those extra hours so clinicians and administrative staff can focus on more important work.  For example, a lot of information comes in through online patient portals. AI now has the ability to read messages

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Vibe coding has been all the rage in recent months as a simple way for anyone to build applications with generative AI. But what if that same easy-going, natural language approach was extended to other enterprise workflows? That’s the promise of an emerging category of agentic AI applications. At VB Transform 2025 today, one such application was on display with the Genspark Super Agent, which was originally launched earlier this year. The Genspark Super Agent’s promise and approach could well extend the concept of vibe coding into vibe working. A key tenet of enabling vibe working, though, is to go with the flow and exert less control rather than more over AI agents. “The vision is simple, we want to bring the Cursor experience for developers to the workspace for everyone,” Kay Zhu, CTO of Genspark, said at VB Transform. “Everyone here should be able to do vibe working… it’s not only the software engineer that can do vibe coding.” >>See all our Transform 2025 coverage here<< Less is more when it comes to enterprise agentic AI According to Zhu, a foundational premise for enabling a vibe working era is letting go of some rigid rules that have defined enterprise workflows for generations. Zhu provocatively challenged enterprise AI orthodoxy, arguing that rigid workflows fundamentally limit what AI agents can accomplish for complex business tasks. During a live demonstration, he showed the system autonomously researching conference speakers, creating presentations, making phone calls and analyzing marketing data.  Most notably, the system placed an actual phone call to the event organizer, VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall, during the live presentation.  “This is normally the call that I don’t really want to

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more As AI-powered tools spread through enterprise software stacks, the rapid growth of the AI coding platform Windsurf is becoming a case study of what happens when developers adopt agentic tooling at scale. In a session at today’s VB Transform 2025 conference, CEO and co-founder Varun Mohan discussed how Windsurf’s integrated development environment (IDE) surpassed one million developers within four months of launch. More notably, the platform now writes over half of the code committed by its user base. The conversation, moderated by VentureBeat CEO Matt Marshall, opened with a brief but pointed disclaimer: Mohan could not comment on OpenAI’s widely reported potential acquisition of Windsurf. The issue has drawn attention following a Wall Street Journal report detailing a brewing standoff between OpenAI and Microsoft over the terms of that deal and broader tensions within their multi-billion-dollar partnership. According to the WSJ, OpenAI seeks to acquire Windsurf without giving Microsoft access to its intellectual property— an issue that could reshape the enterprise AI coding landscape. With that context set aside, the session focused on Windsurf’s technology, enterprise traction, and vision for agentic development. >>See all our Transform 2025 coverage here<< Moving past autocomplete Windsurf’s IDE is built around what the company calls a “mind-meld” loop—a shared project state between humans and AI that enables full coding flows rather than autocomplete suggestions. With this setup, agents can perform multi-file refactors, write test suites, and even launch UI changes when a pull request is initiated. Mohan emphasized that coding assistance can’t stop at code generation. “Only about 20 to 30% of a developer’s time is spent writing code. The rest is debugging, reviewing, and testing. To truly assist, an AI

Bacteria can be engineered to sense a variety of molecules, such as pollutants or soil nutrients, but usually these signals must be detected microscopically. Now Christopher Voigt, head of MIT’s Department of Bio­logical Engineering, and colleagues have triggered bacterial cells to produce signals that can be read from as far as 90 meters away. Their work could lead to the development of sensors for agricultural and other applications, which could be monitored by drones or satellites. The researchers engineered two different types of bacteria, one found in soil and one in water, so that when they encounter certain target chemicals, they produce hyperspectral reporters—molecules that absorb distinctive wavelengths of light across the visible and infrared spectra. These signatures can be detected with hyperspectral cameras, which determine how much of each color wavelength is present in any given pixel. Though the reporting molecules they developed were linked to genetic circuits that detect nearby bacteria, this approach could also be combined with sensors detecting radiation, soil nutrients, or arsenic and other contaminants.  “The nice thing about this technology is that you can plug and play whichever sensor you want,” says Yonatan Chemla, an MIT postdoc who is a lead author of a paper on the work along with Itai Levin, PhD ’24. “There is no reason that any sensor would not be compatible with this technology.” The work is being commercialized through Fieldstone Bio.

Over the past decade, Institute Professor Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93, and her students have used a technique known as layer-by-layer assembly to create a variety of polymer-coated nanoparticles that can be loaded with cancer-fighting drugs. The particles, which could prevent many side effects of chemotherapy by targeting tumors directly, have proved effective in mouse studies. Now the researchers have come up with a technique that allows them to manufacture many more particles in much less time, moving them closer to human use. “There’s a lot of promise with the nanoparticle systems we’ve been developing, and we’ve been really excited more recently with the successes that we’ve been seeing in animal models for our treatments for ovarian cancer in particular,” says Hammond, the senior author of a paper on the new technique along with Darrell Irvine, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute. In the original production technique, layers with different properties can be laid down by alternately exposing a particle to positively and negatively charged polymers, with extensive purification to remove excess polymer after each application. Each layer can carry therapeutics as well as molecules that help the particles find and enter cancer cells. But the process is time-consuming and would be difficult to scale up.  In the new work, the researchers used a microfluidic mixing device that allows them to sequentially add layers as the particles flow through a microchannel. For each layer, they can calculate exactly how much polymer is needed, which eliminates the slow and costly purification step and saves significantly on material costs.
This microfluidic device can be used to assemble the drug delivery nanoparticles rapidly and in large quantities.GRETCHEN ERTL This strategy also facilitates compliance with the FDA’s GMP (good manufacturing practice) requirements, which ensure that products meet safety standards and can be manufactured consistently. “There’s much less chance of any sort of operator mistake or mishaps,” says Ivan Pires, PhD ’24, a postdoc at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a visiting scientist at the Koch Institute, who is the paper’s lead author along with Ezra Gordon ’24. “We can create an innovation within the layer-by-layer nanoparticles and quickly produce it in a manner that we could go into clinical trials with.” In minutes, the researchers can generate 15 milligrams of nanoparticles (enough for about 50 doses for certain cargos), which would have taken close to an hour with the original process. They say this means it would be realistic to produce more than enough for clinical trials and patient use. To demonstrate the technique, the researchers created layered nanoparticles loaded with the immune molecule ­interleukin-­12; they have previously shown that such particles can slow growth of ovarian tumors in mice. Those manufactured using the new technique performed similarly to the originals and managed to bind to cancer tissue without entering the cancer cells. This lets them serve as markers that activate the immune system in the tumor, which can delay tumor growth and even lead to cures in mouse models of ovarian cancer.  The researchers have filed for a patent and are working with MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation in hopes of forming a company to commercialize the technology, which they say could also be applied to glioblastoma and other types of cancer. 

Two new studies from MIT and Harvard Medical School add to a growing body of evidence that infection-fighting molecules called cytokines also influence the brain, leading to behavioral changes during illness.  By mapping the locations in the brain of receptors for different forms of IL-17, the researchers found that the cytokine acts on the somatosensory cortex to promote sociable behavior and on the amygdala to elicit anxiety. These findings suggest that the immune and nervous systems are tightly interconnected, says Gloria Choi, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and one of both studies’ senior authors. “If you’re sick, there’s so many more things that are happening to your internal states, your mood, and your behavioral states, and that’s not simply you being fatigued physically. It has something to do with the brain,” she says. In the cortex, the researchers found certain receptors in a population of neurons that, when overactivated, can lead to autism-like symptoms such as reduced sociability in mice. But the researchers determined that the neurons become less excitable when a specific form of IL-17 binds to the receptors, shedding possible light on why autism symptoms in children often abate when they have fevers. Choi hypothesizes that IL-17 may have evolved as a neuromodulator and was “hijacked” by the immune system only later.  Meanwhile, the researchers also found two types of IL-17 receptors in a certain population of neurons in the amygdala, which plays an important role in processing emotions. When these receptors bind to two forms of IL-17, the neurons become more excitable, leading to an increase in anxiety. Eventually, findings like these may help researchers develop new treatments for conditions such as autism and depression.