Although pharmacological inhibitors of the IL-1 pathway were first developed to control classical autoinflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, the increasing evidence about a key role for this pathway in the pathophysiology of T1DM and T2DM (see reviews by Dinarello, 2014; Ballak et al., 2015; Herder et al., 2015; Pollack et al., 2016) provided a rationale for assessing their therapeutic value in the context of DM. The gene discussed is IL1B; the disease is type 1 diabetes mellitus.