Autophagy and Oral Tissue Regeneration: A Comprehensive Review

The oral cavity is an environment that undergoes consistent remodeling and generation, requiring the involvement of autophagy in oral tissue regeneration. The presence of bacterial colonizers in the oral cavity often leads to oral diseases caused by bacterial infection and immune reactions. Autophagy has been found to play a role in controlling the burden of infectious agents, limiting inflammatory pathologies, regulating myeloid/lymphoid cell differentiation, and coordinating multicellular immunity.

This review focuses on the contribution of autophagy 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 the autophagy machinery in eucryon. The review also covers how autophagy contributes to different components of oral tissue regeneration and the molecular mechanisms involved in autophagy-regulated oral tissue regeneration. Additionally, it explores how autophagy can be regulated by small molecule drugs, biomaterials, exosomes/RNAs, or other specific treatments. The review concludes with a discussion of new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration. Although there is a need for further mechanistic studies to address many questions for therapeutic purposes, this review provides insights into the role of autophagy in oral tissue regeneration and may be helpful for further autophagy studies on other tissue regeneration.