Autophagy and Oral Tissue Regeneration: A Comprehensive Review

The oral cavity is a unique environment that requires consistent remodeling and generation, making autophagy essential for oral tissue regeneration. Moreover, the oral cavity typically harbors a large number of bacterial colonizers that can cause oral diseases through bacterial infection and subsequent immune reaction. Autophagy plays a crucial role in controlling the burden of infectious agents, limiting inflammatory pathologies, regulating myeloid/lymphoid cell differentiation, and coordinating multicellular immunity. Given its role in repairing damaged tissue, autophagy has a close association with oral tissue regeneration.

Although several studies have explored the role of autophagy in oral diseases and oral tissue regeneration, no systematic reviews have focused on its role in oral tissue regeneration. This review, therefore, concentrates 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. Additionally, it reviews how autophagy contributes to different components of oral tissue regeneration and introduces the molecular mechanisms involved in autophagy-regulated oral tissue regeneration. It also discusses how to regulate autophagy using small molecule drugs, biomaterials, exosomes/RNAs, or other specific treatments. Lastly, it presents new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration.

However, the exact mechanism through which autophagy contributes to oral tissue regeneration remains unclear, and further mechanistic studies are necessary for therapeutic purposes. This review aims to provide new insights into human tissue regeneration and may be helpful in further autophagy studies on oral tissue and other tissue regeneration.