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Thorsten Wagner

@thorstenwagner.bsky.social
147 followers 38 following 32 posts

Project group leader @ MPI Dortmund

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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
🫁 Had my lung capacity measured recently. Nurse asks with concern: "Have you started smoking?" Me: "No, but I recently started smoking crack." Dead silence. Pen hovering mid-air. Pure confusion. She did not put that in my chart. 💀
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
is here someone who knows speech synthesis with XTTS v2 really well?
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
2/2 Promising enough that an open-label extension is planned – all eligible participants will receive the drug. Phase 3 in 2027. I'm one of the 69 patients. And honestly? I hope I was in the placebo group – because so far, I haven't noticed any slowing.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
1/2 I'm part of the ANQUR clinical trial by QurAlis – testing QRL-201, a drug designed to restore a protein called STATHMIN-2 that most ALS patients lose. Interim data published last week show promising results. www.quralis.com/news/quralis...
quralis.com
QurAlis Demonstrates Effects on Disease Progression and Target Engagement in ANQUR Clinical Trial of QRL-201, a First-in-Class Precision Medicine in Development for Sporadic ALS - QurAlis
First clinical development program in sporadic ALS patients to show potential to restore STATHMIN-2 expression, a statistically significant effect on a
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
5/5 But I built it also for others. And maybe that's enough. Building it felt like agency. Like pushing back. That's what I'm looking for in every project I'll share here. More to come.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
4/5 Here's the honest part: I barely used it myself. I'm part of a clinical trial. The measurements came constantly. At some point, all that tracking just pulled me down. Numbers that remind you, over and over, what you're losing.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
3/5 ALSTracker tracks disease progression across different phases – reference vs. intervention. It can't replace clinical trials. But it gives you a personal, data-driven picture. It's open source. Free. No data collected. github.com/MPI-Dortmund...
github.com
GitHub - MPI-Dortmund/ALSTracker: Bayesian ALS Tracking and Phase Evaluation
Bayesian ALS Tracking and Phase Evaluation. Contribute to MPI-Dortmund/ALSTracker development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
2/5 When you have ALS, you experiment. Supplements, drugs, hope. See alsuntangled.com for why that's so common. So I built ALSTracker. It won't give you certainty. But it replaces gut feeling with something more solid: Bayesian statistics. alstracker.mpi-dortmund.mpg.dee
alsuntangled.com
ALS Untangled®
ALSUntangled® reviews alternative and off label treatments, with the goal of helping people with ALS make more informed decisions about them.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
1/5 ALS takes a lot. But it doesn't take curiosity. A new thread: how I stay motivated – through projects that are meaningful, or simply fun 🧵
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Thank you, Lars. One 'good' thing about my ALS is that I don't experience pain. I guess that would break my resilience.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Thanks, Marten! I won't bury my head in the sand. My neck muscles are too weak for that anyway^^
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
everytime i start Windows a baby tux is crying
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
you can exchange teams with Windows and this post is still entirly true
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Thank you! Send @taputechnic.bsky.social my best wishes and ask him if he can give me my nerd card back. I watched Star Wars in the meantime, although I prefer Star Trek.
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Raunser lab @raunser-lab.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
Great thread, Thorsten. You are our hero! You have done so much for our group - always with humor, always with fun, always eager to learn and curious: “the ones who spread love, get love back.”
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Lars-Anders Carlson @lacarlson.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
I don't think we've met, but we've used crYOLO a lot in my group. I wanted to let you know that your thread is a real inspiration in terms of the human mind's resilience. We all eventually face disease and weakness, but very few cope with it the way you do. My thoughts are with you.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
Thank you, Stefan. But this only works because of the environment you've created. You built a lab where curiosity is welcomed, humor is part of the culture, and people actually want to show up.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
* Stefan Raunser of course - sorry for the typo
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
thanks ricardo! glad to have people like you in the community. Also send best wishes to davide
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
7/7 You could be worse off. I say that without irony and without sugarcoating anything. ALS is brutal. But my starting position is better than many others'. Acknowledging that feels important
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
6/7 And then there's family. Parents, in-laws, friends. A network that shows up. I grew up in a family of craftsmen – priceless when you need to add a fully accessible bathroom. You simply cannot put a price on that.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
5/7 But most of all: a loving wife without whom I would be lost. And the strongest kids I could ever imagine. They don't just support me – they carry me.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
4/7 I have savings for what insurance doesn't cover – a van with a wheelchair ramp, for example. That keeps me mobile. Not everyone has that option. And I have an accessible workplace, with tremendous support from my boss Stefan Raunger and my colleagues.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
3/6 The chair weighs 200kg. In a rented apartment, I'd be trapped. I own a house with a garden. That's not just planning – that's luck. And I know it.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
2/6 My wheelchair costs €32,000. The controls another €12,000. All of it paid by public health insurance. In Germany, that's possible. I don't take that for granted.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
1/6 Living with ALS also means this: learning to count your privileges. A thread.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
No ventilation is necessary (yet).
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
Other than that, typing via eye tracking is slow. Here I have developed several things to speed that up. I am going to write about that soon. Also, the speech synthesis including voice cloning I wrote on my own. This will be a separate post..
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
These are the questions I am going to write about. Short answer: I enjoy coding and so I enjoy working. I'm glad to be a nerd so I develop a lot of stuff on my own. Eye tracking hardware I had to buy though. This forced me to switch from Linux to Windows. It has not improved since 15 years.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
One first decision after diagnosis was that I would continue: continue to work, continue to have fun, continue to laugh, continue to hope. Luckily I was always a person with a quite digital life. Using eye tracking you can still do a lot. Especially as a software developer.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
Thanks Kota! But I miss the ground truth in that plot^^
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
On Monday they are going to check if I need ventilation during the night. Fingers crossed that I don't need it yet.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
In September 2024, I was diagnosed with ALS. Today, I can no longer speak, I am confined to a wheelchair, and I can no longer move my arms. It's really shitty. I will write here soon about how I am coping with this and how I am trying to stay cheerful. #ALS
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
In September 2024, I was diagnosed with ALS. Today, I can no longer speak, I am confined to a wheelchair, and I can no longer move my arms. It's really shitty. I will write here soon about how I am coping with this and how I am trying to stay cheerful. #ALS
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Wout Oosterheert @woutoosterheert.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
My first post on this forum! 😄 I am happy to share that our #openaccess review on the #molecular mechanisms of #actin filament polymerization and dissasembly is now online @cp-trendscellbio.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/cell-... Big thanks to my amazing colleagues in Dortmund
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BioVoxxel (Jan Brocher) @biovoxxel.de · 21/11/2024
#BIAToolTip No.7 The Ridge Detection plugin from @thorstenwagner.bsky.social is really nice tool gem to automatically detect line-like structures in regular sized images in 2D/3D. Even though, not actively maintained anymore, it runs stable and does what it should.
imagej.net
Ridge Detection
The ImageJ wiki is a community-edited knowledge base on topics relating to ImageJ, a public domain program for processing and analyzing scientific images, and its ecosystem of derivatives and variants...
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Sjors Scheres @sjorsscheres.bsky.social · 30/10/2023
Oh wow, this is BIG: #MotionCor3 and #AreTomo2 for #cryoEM single-particle analysis and #teamtomo are now open-source!! Thank you Shawn Zheng and colleagues at the Chan Zuckerberg Imaging Institute. #OpenSoftwareAcceleratesScience github.com/czimagingins...
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Tobias Raisch @traisch.bsky.social · 16/10/2023
Together with Stefan Raunser, I wrote a little review on neurotoxic insecticides acting on ion channels. We focus on structures and mechanisms and try to reveal similarities in modes of action between chemically diverse compounds. In the end, many act surprisingly similar! rdcu.be/doHyK
Figure 1 from the linked paper. It shows the main targets of neurotoxic insecticides, which are mainly ion channels belonging either to the pentameric ligand-gated ion channel family or the tetrameric voltage-gated ion channel family.
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Thorsten Wagner @thorstenwagner.bsky.social · 08/10/2023
Darf ich fragen, welche Analyse zum Erstarken der Rechten du am überzeugendsten findest? "Deutschland Rechts Aussen" von Quent lese ich gerade - gibt es weitere lesenswerte?
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