Autophagy and Oral Tissue Regeneration: A Comprehensive Review

The oral cavity is a unique environment that requires constant remodeling and regeneration, making autophagy essential for oral tissue regeneration. Additionally, the oral cavity is home to a large number of bacterial colonizers, and many oral diseases are caused by bacterial infection and subsequent immune reactions. Autophagy plays a crucial role in controlling the burden of infectious agents, limiting inflammatory pathologies, regulating myeloid/lymphoid cell differentiation, and coordinating multicellular immunity. Therefore, autophagy has a close association with oral tissue regeneration and repairment of damaged tissue.

Despite many studies exploring the role of autophagy in oral diseases and oral tissue regeneration, there have been no systematic reviews on the subject. This review focuses on how autophagy contributes to stem cell regulation and oral tissue regeneration, providing an overview of autophagy machinery in eucryon. We also discuss 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.

We further review how autophagy contributes to different components of oral tissue regeneration, including the alleviation of survival stress in oral stem cells. Finally, we explore new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration. However, the precise mechanisms by which autophagy contributes to oral tissue regeneration remain unclear, and further mechanistic studies are necessary for therapeutic purposes. Our review may be helpful in furthering autophagy studies on oral tissue and other tissue regeneration, providing new insights into human tissue regeneration.