In an ice rink measuring 200 feet by 85, 10 of the 12 players on a professional hockey team skate at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour, vying for a frozen, vulcanized rubber puck that, when forcefully shot, can reach 100 miles per hour. Players collide with each other, get rammed into the rink’s wood or fiberglass walls and steel goal posts, skate on razor-sharp blades and swiftly maneuver hockey sticks measuring up to 63 inches in length. What could possibly go wrong?

Just a few decades ago, cardiac surgeons, engineers and scientists were working on new technology that would revolutionize open-heart surgery. Specifically, they were developing a device that would act as a patient’s heart and lungs, keeping the body’s blood supply circulating while the heart underwent complex repairs. At Barnes Hospital, now Barnes-Jewish, a solution to the problem arrived in 1956: the Gibbon-Mayo heart-lung pump.

A little boy is cured of cancer. A woman finds relief after months of pain. A man gets the new lung he needs to breathe easy and keep living. A baby goes home from the hospital—healthy after a frightening early birth and a stay in the newborn intensive care unit. With its cutting-edge technologies and lifesaving advances, the field of medicine is full of stories like these. This is apparent every day in health-care systems across the country and around the world.

A first-of-its kind device, called IpsiHand, will soon be available to people working to recover hand and arm movement after a stroke. And it works by using a technology called BCI, short for brain-computer interface. In fact, it is the first stroke-rehabilitation device that relies on BCI. The device is not yet available to patients, but its developer, a Washington University startup called Neurolutions Inc., is preparing to bring the device to market.

The new drug sotorasib reduces tumor size and shows promise in improving survival among people with lung tumors caused by a specific DNA mutation, according to results of a global phase 2 clinical trial. The drug is designed to shut down the effects of the mutation, which is found in about 13% of people with lung adenocarcinoma, a common type of non-small-cell lung cancer. Non-small-cell lung cancer makes up over 80% of all lung cancers. And more than 200,000 new cases of non-small-cell lung cancer are diagnosed annually in the United States.