Autophagy in Oral Tissue Regeneration: A Comprehensive Review

The oral cavity is a unique environment that requires constant remodeling and regeneration. Autophagy plays a crucial role in oral tissue regeneration, especially in controlling the burden of infectious agents, limiting inflammatory pathologies, and coordinating multicellular immunity. Autophagy also contributes to stem cell regulation and the repairment of damaged tissue. However, there has been no systematic review on the role of autophagy in oral tissue regeneration. In this review, we focus on how autophagy contributes to different components of oral tissue regeneration, including molecular mechanisms involved in autophagy-regulated oral tissue regeneration and how to regulate autophagy by small molecule drugs, biomaterials, exosomes/RNAs, or other specific treatments. We also discuss new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration. Further mechanistic studies are still necessary to address many questions for therapeutic purposes. Our review may provide new insights into human tissue regeneration and help further autophagy studies on oral tissue and other tissue regeneration.