IL18 and colitis: While early pre-clinical studies identified IL-18 as a mediator of inflammation-induced pathology in colitis models, more recent work by a number of groups using various inflammasome-deficient mice has suggested that administration of recombinant IL-18 (rIL-18) can overcome such deficiencies and restore protection from chemically-induced colitis, with the majority of these studies concluding that this is attributed to enhanced epithelial regeneration and barrier repair in response to IL-18 (108–110).