NLRP3 and obesity due to melanocortin 4 receptor deficiency: Globally, 537 million adults are currently living with diabetes and its secondary complications, including diabetic nephropathy (International diabetes federation diabetes Atlas, 2021) Associated with a range of chronic inflammatory diseases, including atherosclerosis (Sharma et al., 2021), diabetes (Ding et al., 2019) and obesity (Qin et al., 2021), recent research highlights the key role of NLRP3 in both glomerular (Shahzad et al., 2015; Ilyas et al., 2017; Hou et al., 2020) and tubular injury (Ding et al., 2018; Zhang and Wang, 2020) in the context of diabetic nephropathy.