Autophagy in Oral Tissue Regeneration: A Comprehensive Review

The oral cavity is a unique environment that requires constant remodeling and regeneration, making autophagy essential for oral tissue regeneration. Additionally, the oral cavity contains numerous bacterial colonizers, which can cause oral diseases through bacterial infection and subsequent immune reactions. Autophagy plays a crucial role in controlling the burden of infectious agents, limiting inflammatory pathologies, regulating myeloid/lymphoid cell differentiation, and coordinating multicellular immunity. Autophagy is closely associated with the repairment of damaged tissue, and numerous studies have explored the role of autophagy in oral diseases and oral tissue regeneration. However, there have been no systematic reviews on the role of autophagy in oral tissue regeneration.

This review focuses on how autophagy contributes to stem cell regulation and oral tissue regeneration. It discusses the role of autophagy in alleviating the survival stress of oral stem cells and provides an overview of autophagy machinery in eukaryotes. The review also examines how autophagy contributes to different components of oral tissue regeneration, introduces molecular mechanisms involved in autophagy-regulated oral tissue regeneration, and discusses how to regulate autophagy using small molecule drugs, biomaterials, exosomes/RNAs, or other specific treatments. Finally, the review discusses new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration. However, many questions remain unanswered, and mechanistic studies are necessary for therapeutic purposes. This review may help further autophagy studies on oral tissue and other tissue regeneration, providing new insights into human tissue regeneration.