Autophagy's Role in Oral Tissue Regeneration: A Comprehensive Review

The oral cavity is a unique environment that requires consistent remodeling and regeneration, making autophagy essential in oral tissue regeneration. Additionally, the oral cavity often contains a large number of bacterial colonizers, leading to many oral diseases caused by bacterial infection and subsequent immune reactions. Autophagy has been shown to play a role in controlling the burden of infectious agents, limiting inflammatory pathologies, regulating myeloid/lymphoid cell differentiation, and coordinating multicellular immunity. Thus, autophagy has a close association with oral tissue regeneration and repairment of damaged tissue.

Despite numerous studies exploring the role of autophagy in oral diseases and oral tissue regeneration, there have been no systematic reviews on the topic. In this review, we focus on how autophagy contributes to stem cell regulation and oral tissue regeneration. We discuss the role of autophagy in alleviating the survival stress of oral stem cells and provide an overview of the autophagy machinery in eukaryotes. We also review how autophagy contributes to different components of oral tissue regeneration and introduce the molecular mechanisms involved in autophagy-regulated oral tissue regeneration. Additionally, we discuss how to regulate autophagy using small molecule drugs, biomaterials, exosomes/RNAs, or other specific treatments.

Finally, we explore new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration. However, it is still unclear how autophagy contributes to oral tissue regeneration, and mechanistic studies are necessary to address many questions for therapeutic purposes. We hope that our review will be helpful for further autophagy studies on oral tissue and other tissue regeneration and provide new insights into human tissue regeneration.