Since the day of Milan’s diagnosis, Sam Gambhir had been “madly searching, literally working around the clock trying to find something that could slow down this tumor,” he says.

“Sam was emotionally overwhelmed for a while,” recalls Mallick. “He was still effective and reaching out across the globe to get answers, but you definitely felt this sense of helplessness and desperation — something you never feel from Sam.” But then, one day, he just snapped out of it. “I remember him saying to me something along the lines of, ‘I feel more awake, aware, plugged in and on top of things than I have ever in my career.’ And so there was this radical transformation where he went from being in shock and dismay to taking charge. It was remarkable, seeing him click back over into problem-solving scientist mode.”

Gambhir’s widespread search led him to explore some unorthodox therapeutics. At a medical conference a few months after Milan’s diagnosis, Gambhir noticed a poster identifying a natural plant extract as a potential anti-cancer agent. The plant, called ashwaganda, had been known for thousands of years in Ayurveda medicine — a natural healing system originating in India about 5,000 years ago — to have some unusual properties against many diseases. “I said, well, this is a long shot, but why don’t we test it?’ ” Gambhir says.

After his surgery, Milan had radiation therapy for about seven weeks, which was necessary to keep his tumor in check, even though it might also cause further cell damage. “He had braces,” says Aruna Gambhir, “and had to go to the orthodontist to get them removed so that they could do the radiation therapy.” For analysis of Milan’s image findings and guidance on his therapy, Sam Gambhir relied on his colleagues Sarah Donaldson, MD, professor of radiation oncology, and professors of radiology Nancy Fischbein, MD, and Tarik Massoud, MD, PhD.

Milan was well enough to return to school for his sophomore year, and the family did its best to return to a sense of normalcy. Even before he went back to school, Milan was determined to keep up with the activities he’d started before he got sick. “Not only did he continue working in the lab,” says Aruna, “but he was doing an accelerated precalculus class so that he would qualify to take advanced-placement calculus when he went back to school in the fall as a sophomore. We told him to take a few months off or reduce his load, because he was in all honors and AP classes. But the only thing he would drop was speech and debate, which was hard for him to give up. He was full-on, full throttle. That’s the kind of kid he was.”

“Most people, if they were as sick as Milan, would take a break, go to the beach, relax,” says de la Zerda. “How many people would say they want to push even harder to focus even more on their work? Milan never let go. He had the utmost dedication and passion you can imagine.”

“I think how he saw it,” says Fann, “was that it was this physical thing he had to overcome, and that he could do it with hard work like he had always done.”

From October 2013 through May 2014, while undergoing several courses of chemotherapy and cancer vaccines, Milan presented his diagnostic device concept at five different science competitions. He was named a regional finalist at the Siemens Competition, a grand prize winner at the 2014 Synopsys Silicon Valley Science and Technology Championship and a Fourth Grand Award winner in Medicine and Health Sciences at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in May. To the first competition, he wore a hat to cover the areas where his hair had not yet grown back. “Milan never let anybody in the competitions know about his situation,” says Aruna. “He wanted to win purely by his own merit.”

Aruna Gambhir also had to attend to her own health. After her recurrence of breast cancer when she was 47, doctors had advised her to eventually undergo, a complete hysterectomy — surgical removal of the uterus and cervix — based on the increased risk of uterine cancer in women with certain types of breast cancer. “At that point I thought, let me just wait on that,” she says. “I wasn’t ready.” But her Li-Fraumeni diagnosis introduced a new urgency, and Aruna had the preventive hysterectomy in the summer of 2014. “I didn’t want something to happen where I couldn’t support Milan,” she says. “I just had to get it over with so I could get home and focus on him.”

That summer, Milan continued to work in de la Zerda’s lab, celebrated his 16th birthday and earned his driver’s license. On Sept. 1, 2014, he drove himself to his first day of his junior year at Bellarmine. “I guess he is not that sweet baby who held on to my hand before the start of preschool,” his mother wrote on the CaringBridge web journal that she used to keep friends and family updated about his life. “Milan is cherishing his independence.”

“We didn’t really talk about how sick he was, or how he felt about it,” Fann says. “We spent a lot of time driving his car around, playing music, just trying to be normal.”

Just a couple of months later, in November 2014, an MRI scan revealed a new tumor at the base of Milan’s skull. “When we got the news of the recurrence, he went into his room for a few minutes,” Aruna Gambhir says. “Then he came out and said he was ready to fight.” Milan had a second surgery to remove the new tumor, followed by radiation treatments that lasted until January 2015. In February he went to Gainesville, Florida, for six weeks to undergo an experimental stem cell transplant designed to manipulate his cells to mobilize his immune system. “It was a clinical trial of one,” says Aruna Gambhir.

His friends all pitched in to buy Milan a white electric guitar, which they signed with messages of hope and affection. Jose Hernandez, the friend Milan and Kiki Fann had played guitar with in middle school, rode his skateboard more than 9 miles from his home in East Palo Alto to sign the guitar and help present it to Milan. “He was the best teacher I ever had,” Hernandez told Aruna Gambhir.

After a year and a half of study, Sam Gambhir and his team confirmed that a molecule in the ashwaganda plant known as Withaferin A was indeed an active ingredient with significant anti-brain-tumor effects. Best of all, since the drug was a natural agent, it would require neither FDA approval nor a prescription to administer to patients. The results were published as the cover story in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Neuro-Oncology.

For Milan, the results came too late. “We saw that it was working in the last few weeks before he died,” Gambhir says. “But I had worries that it might cause some unexpected toxicity.” Milan was too ill to undertake a new treatment, even a natural extract. “His death was extremely hard, because he lost his hearing, then he lost his vision, then he lost his ability to speak, his ability to move, and he was in home hospice for several months.” On May 2, 2015, 21 months after his tumor was diagnosed, Milan died. He was 16 years old.

Milan’s laptop still sits on his desk in the home office he shared with his mother. Its cover bears the cardinal “S” for Stanford, where he had always hoped to enroll as a freshman this fall. Instead, a memorial for him was held on May 13, 2015, in Stanford’s Memorial Church. The grand Romanesque Revival sanctuary, which seats 1,200, was nearly full. Two family friends performed “Tears in Heaven,” by Eric Clapton, on the guitar, and a recording of one of Milan and Kiki Fann’s jam sessions was played. Carolyn Carhart Quezada, the mother of one of Milan’s closest friends since preschool, remembered Milan building his own lemonade stand out of PVC pipe, and later helping her son build a computer. She called him “a friend of a lifetime.”

“I keep hearing that he’s gone,” says Fann, “but I just feel like he’s still here and still helps me through things. I think, if Milan were here, how he’d encourage me to do things differently. And that’s made me try things I might not have tried, like speaking out in speeches and classes. And I’m still playing guitar, working on an album this year, and planning to major in music at college.”

Milan lives on not only through the memories of his family and friends, but through his scientific legacy. Today, as glioblastoma research progresses in labs around the world, his living cells, coded in anonymity, are part of it. And a few days after Milan’s death, the Wearable Ultrasonic Device for the Early Detection of Tumor Recurrence he had developed with de la Zerda was granted its patent. Sam Gambhir’s lab will oversee the process of bringing a device to fruition, which is expected to take several years. Lab members are also preparing the related research paper, which Milan kept working on until the final stages of his illness, for publication. “We’re hoping it will come out sometime soon,” says de la Zerda. “And when it does, I have all expectations that it will draw a lot of attention.”

For Sam and Aruna Gambhir, grief is woven into the fabric of their lives now. “The worst has already happened,” Aruna says. “We can’t change it.” Though Aruna must continue to monitor her own cancer vulnerability, finding the motivation to do so is, for the moment, difficult. “I don’t want to go in there,” she says, referring to the cancer clinic. “I’m not sure when I’ll want to.”

“I have a tough time walking through Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital now,” Sam Gambhir says. But the experience also deepened his empathy for other parents. “I think I was always empathetic toward illness,” he says, “but not as empathetic as I am now, knowing what it’s like to have a sick child.” Around the time Milan had his second surgery, “I remember seeing a parent in the hospital with a small baby who had a brain tumor,” Gambhir says. “It was so good to be able to try to talk to them and comfort them. It also made me appreciate how lucky we were that Milan made it to 16 years.”

