IL1B and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: While some authors assume that NLRP3 is responsible for the release of high levels of IL-1β found in the lungs of COPD patients (Di Stefano et al., 2014; Kim et al., 2015), others demonstrated an indirect role of NLRP3 inflammasome in COPD (De Nardo et al., 2014; Di Stefano et al., 2014; Yang et al., 2015).