Patients with excessive inflammation with a need of corticosteroid therapy (such as those with severe hematologic or autoimmune disease, acute lung injury, septic patients or some chronic inflammatory syndromes) or those at high risk of steroid-induced tissue damage but lower risk for severe infection (e.g., selected oncology or transplant populations, not acutely neutropenic) could benefit from NLRP3-targeted dampening of the innate immune response. Here, NLRP3 is linked to infection.