Soft tissue wound healing represents a spectrum of responses from chronic wounds that fail to heal, to adult scarring wounds and through to wounds in the oral cavity that heal in a scarless fashion. This spectrum of response is reflected by the distinct cellular genotypes/phenotypes of mesenchymal cells isolated from these tissues. Whilst chronic wound fibroblasts are prematurely senescent (which impacts on their ability to drive repair of the wound) oral mucosal fibroblasts exhibit preferential wound healing properties and in fact are more like regenerative foetal cells. To this end, we have demonstrated that patient matched oral mucosal (OMFs) and skin (SFs) fibroblasts have distinct wound reparative differences. For example, OMFs demonstrate an increased ability to migrate into/repopulate a monolayer wound space and an increased ability to reorganise their surrounding extracellular matrix (due to increased production of matrix metalloproteinases and growth factors such as hepatocyte growth factor). This is all linked to intrinsic differences in the ageing profiles of OMFs, with such cells being able to undergo many more population doublings than patient matched SFs and thereby senescing later. Our more recent work however, has demonstrated that it is actually an oral progenitor cell population within this general fibroblast population that is potentially key to the successful tissue repair process. This is due to the fact that such oral progenitors are highly clonally expandable (greater than 50 population doublings), multipotent (bone, fat, cartilage and neuronal-like cells) and potently immunosuppressive (many hundreds of fold times better then mesenchymal stromal cells). They also have the added benefit of being anti-bacterial (gram negative and gram positive) in nature. Our on-going work is investigating small extracellular vesicle secretions from these oral progenitor cells to establish if these are the key factors involved in the scarless wound repair process. Importantly, with the tissue containing these oral progenitor cells being easy to access and healing without a scar, we suggest that these oral progenitor cells are ideal for future tissue repair strategies.