**The German Who Conquered Cancer and HIV with a Lifesaving Stem Cell Gift**

The man and the woman standing side by side are like family, though they met by chance.

She saved his life.

Now, Marc Franke says stem cell donor Anja Prause is "like a sister to me."

Franke, 55, is one of very few people worldwide who are considered to have been cured of HIV. He had a stem cell transplant, necessary due to leukaemia, and through that, overcame HIV as a side effect.

"I am happy that I was able to help him," says Prause, 58.

They only had a tiny window of opportunity. Shortly after registering as a donor, a decision she made after chatting with a colleague at work, she found out about a possible recipient.

He was a total stranger.

"It was all a huge coincidence. I had breast cancer, and it was very serious. A year later, I would no longer have been able to be a donor," says Prause.

"I received the first letter from Marc when I had my first chemo. And I said to my husband: "If I must die now, I can at least say, I had a great life. I gave birth to a great child - and I cured someone of cancer."

But she beat cancer too.

What she only found out through donating to Franke was that she has a rare immunity to HIV.

For Marc, in turn, the chance to also defeat HIV came through the risky but, due to the leukaemia, unavoidable stem cell donation.

Franke says that at the time he heard about the "Berlin patient" Timothy Brown, who was also freed of HIV after a stem cell transplant for cancer. In his case this was thanks to someone with a rare genetic trait that confers resistance to HIV infection.

He was considered to be the first person cured of HIV/AIDS this way.

"I thought: if it worked once, why shouldn't it work a second time," he says today. In 2008, he found out he was infected with HIV, and in 2010 he was diagnosed with leukaemia. Then came chemo in 2011. He had a relapse in 2012 - and a stem cell transplant in 2013.

He met his husband in hospital. "That gave me endless strength to get through this time. I wanted to get back on my feet so that I could have a life with him."

The main disease of the patients who were considered cured of HIV was always cancer - and they only had a chance of survival through a stem cell transplant. Doctors say the risk of not surviving this therapy is 10% to 15%.

After he recovered, Franke had his "second coming-out," he says,

He became known as the Dusseldorf patient - following The Berlin Patient and The London Patient, other HIV sufferers who also had cancer and were also cured the same way. Their identities were initially protected through this nomenclature.

"I am now fighting against HIV stigmatization," he says in words also directed towards Sharon Lewin, president of the International AIDS Society (IAS). It is not good to always talk about AIDS, in his view.

"People then have the image from the 1980s in their heads," he says, meaning all the prejudices of that time, too.

Adam Castillejo, who became known as the London Patient, and Paul Edmonds, a patient at the City of Hope - the name of the US cancer clinic where he was treated - met up with Franke at a Munich conference last year, for the largest global meeting on HIV.

He is happy, says Edmonds, who lived with HIV for 30 years and attended the gathering with his husband.

Castillejo wants to see more efforts in the fight against HIV. "We must do more to find a cure for everyone," he says, adding that he is committed to this wherever possible.

He and the others who have recovered are primarily cancer patients - who have also been freed from HIV as a side effect. But this can give hope, he says, appealing, "Please don't give up hope."

But a low-risk cure for people with HIV remains a distant prospect.

Christian Gaebler from the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Charité hospital in Berlin presented the second Berlin patient, the seventh patient worldwide to be cured at the conference.

Here, though, a stem cell transplant was not an option. "I do believe that we can do it," says Gaebler about the chance of a cure available to many.

"But not in the next few years but in decades."