A French biotech has raised €12m to test whether GLP-1 drugs can modify osteoarthritis progression.
The funding will advance 4Moving Biotech’s lead programme, 4P004, toward a phase 2a proof-of-concept readout in knee osteoarthritis, a joint disease that causes pain and stiffness.
Despite affecting more than 600 million people worldwide, no therapy approved in Europe or the US has yet been shown to slow or modify disease progression in osteoarthritis.
4Moving Biotech is testing whether GLP-1 receptor agonists, drugs best known for diabetes and obesity, can succeed where others have fallen short.
“With this closing in place, we are well equipped to reach the next value-creation milestone by delivering robust phase 2a data and reaching a proof-of-concept inflection point,” said Luc Boblet, chief executive of 4Moving Biotech.
Rather than systemic administration, the company is testing whether GLP-1 biology can be made relevant to osteoarthritis by acting directly in the joint, targeting local inflammation and tissue responses that systemic approaches have repeatedly failed to address.
“By acting directly in the joint, 4P004 tackles pain, inflammation and tissue damage through GLP-1-mediated pathways,” said professor Francis Berenbaum, the company’s chief medical officer.
The study is designed to assess “dual efficacy: symptom relief and synovial health improvement via contrast-enhanced MRI,” which images the joint lining, with topline results expected in the second half of 2026.
The round was secured from private investors and family offices investing directly into 4Moving Biotech, a subsidiary of 4P-Pharma, and combines equity with loans, a structure the company says is aligned with long-term value creation.
It follows a €7.6m France 2030 i-Démo grant awarded last year and coincides with the transatlantic expansion of the INFLAM-MOTION phase 2a study to the US.
Founded in 2020 as a spin-off from 4P-Pharma, 4Moving Biotech has now raised around €30m in total, combining private capital with non-dilutive public funding.
The broader landscape for disease-modifying osteoarthritis drugs offers little room for overconfidence.
A 2025 review of phase two and three osteoarthritis trials found that while “many DMOADs have progressed to clinical trials, very few have made a significant impact and none have been approved for clinical use.
Reviewing eleven candidates tested between 2010 and 2024, including small molecules, biologics and cell or gene-based therapies, authors conclude that failure has been driven less by any single mechanism than by the difficulty of demonstrating truly disease-modifying benefit.
Several programmes reported statistically significant effects on either pain or joint structure, but rarely both.
The review notes that “the clinical relevance of a marginal increase in one without the other remains unclear,” warning that structural effects without symptom relief may be clinically meaningless, while pain relief without structural protection could even accelerate disease progression.
Over the past decade, major programmes at Pfizer, Eli Lilly, AbbVie, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi have been discontinued or deprioritised after failing to deliver regulator-acceptable evidence of disease modification.
In 2020, Unity Biotechnology reported phase two data showing that its senolytic candidate UBX0101, developed as a disease-modifying therapy for knee osteoarthritis, failed to deliver clinically meaningful improvements in pain or joint structure.
Unity subsequently discontinued its osteoarthritis programme, exited the field entirely and ceased operations in 2025.
The phase 2a readout will be the point at which the GLP-1 approach in osteoarthritis either earns its next chapter or joins a long list of programmes that fell short.
