Autophagy and 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 the presence of bacterial colonizers that can cause oral diseases. Autophagy helps in controlling infectious agents, limiting inflammatory pathologies, regulating cell differentiation, and coordinating multicellular immunity. It also helps in repairing damaged tissue, indicating a close association between autophagy and oral tissue regeneration. Although many studies have explored the role of autophagy in oral diseases and tissue regeneration, there have been no systematic reviews on the topic.

In this review, we focus 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 autophagy machinery in eukaryotes. We also review how autophagy contributes to different components of oral tissue regeneration and introduce the molecular mechanisms involved in autophagy-regulated oral tissue regeneration. Additionally, we discuss how to regulate autophagy by small molecule drugs, biomaterials, exosomes/RNAs, or other specific treatments. Finally, we present new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration. However, the mechanism behind how autophagy contributes to oral tissue regeneration is still unclear, and further mechanistic studies are necessary for therapeutic purposes. Our review may be helpful for further autophagy studies on oral tissue and other tissue regeneration, providing new insights into human tissue regeneration.