Autophagy and Oral Tissue Regeneration: A Comprehensive Review

The oral cavity is a unique environment that requires constant remodeling and regeneration, which highlights the importance of autophagy in oral tissue regeneration. Furthermore, the oral cavity is known to harbor numerous bacterial colonizers, which can cause various oral diseases through bacterial infections and subsequent immune reactions. Autophagy has been found to be involved in controlling the burden of infectious agents, limiting inflammatory pathologies, regulating myeloid/lymphoid cell differentiation, and coordinating multicellular immunity. Therefore, the role of autophagy in repairing damaged tissue, combined with its role in controlling bacterial infections, suggests a close association between autophagy and oral tissue regeneration. However, despite the numerous studies exploring the role of autophagy in oral diseases and oral tissue regeneration, there is a lack of systematic reviews on the subject.

This review focuses 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. Additionally, we review how autophagy contributes to the different components of oral tissue regeneration. We also introduce the molecular mechanisms involved in autophagy-regulated oral tissue regeneration and how to regulate autophagy using small molecule drugs, biomaterials, exosomes/RNAs, or other specific treatments. Finally, we discuss new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration. However, the precise mechanism by which autophagy contributes to oral tissue regeneration is still unclear, and more mechanistic studies are necessary for therapeutic purposes. Our review can serve as a useful resource for further autophagy studies on oral tissue and other tissue regeneration, and we hope to provide new insights into human tissue regeneration.