P2RX7 and diabetic kidney disease: It is now clear that activation of P2X7 receptor promotes pathologic inflammation in several experimental models of renal diseases, such as glomerulonephritis (Deplano et al., 2013), diabetic nephropathy (Solini et al., 2013; Rodrigues et al., 2014), tubulointerstitial nephritis (Gonçalves et al., 2006), hypertensive nephropathy (Franco et al., 2015), acute kidney injury (Koo et al., 2017), and chronic kidney injury (Granata et al., 2015) via activation of NLPR3 inflammasome and consequent release of inflammatory cytokine, such as IL-1β and IL-18.