Smart Biopolymer Scaffolds for Oral and Craniofacial Regenerative Therapy: Translational Perspectives Toward...

Oral tissue defects following oral cancer treatments pose significant reconstruction challenges due to septic resection margins, residual cancer cells, and impaired angiogenesis. Conventional approaches like grafts suffer from limitations such as postoperative infections and reduced efficacy. Biopolymer-based "smart scaffolds" have emerged as promising solutions, initially developed for bone cell regeneration and now engineered to address multiple needs, including drug delivery, antimicrobial activity, immune modulation, and angiogenesis. Scaffolds tailored for oral cancer defects specifically target residual tumor cells via anticancer agent delivery, minimizing recurrence at surgical sites. Although no studies yet focus directly on cancer resection sites, this narrative review consolidates key advances from 2019 to 2025. Relevant literature was drawn from Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed. It covers the design, engineering, and application of multifunctional biopolymer scaffolds for oral tissue regeneration, along with an overview of oral cancer pathogenesis, limitations of current therapies, and perspectives on defect repair and healing. The review also discusses recent enhancements in scaffold functionality and their impact on regeneration efficacy, concluding with key limitations and future directions to guide researchers and clinicians in optimizing post-treatment regenerative therapies.