The basic research isn't what costs billions, of course.

If we've got "worthless cures" and a "waste [of] billions", it's because we've got:

1. pharmaceutical corporations incentivized to take any random chemical they might be able to make money off of by telling people it has a certain effect (and that isn't so useless that the FDA will literally tell them to stop selling it for being useless) and get them on the market; and

2. an FDA body incentivized to put billion-dollar requirements on corporations to research a chemical's safety by putting it through a gauntlet of trials, and to research said chemical's efficacy (i.e. whether it has some "statistically visible" effect on people), but without that efficacy test translating into anything like a chemical's marketable usefulness (i.e. it being the answer to any problem anyone actually has, such that a doctor would be independently motivated to prescribe it without the pharmacorp's encouragement.)

In other words, our system assumes that pharmacorps will only bother putting drugs on the market when they're useful. But that makes no sense: if peddling snake oil—snake oil the FDA has rubber-stamped as having "[statistically] noticeable effect" on some disease—is just as profitable as peddling cures, why would pharmacorps care about curing anything?

It's common knowledge that most nutritional supplements—especially the kind that are marketed as containing some named plant, rather than some named active ingredient—are useless, and often don't even contain what they claim to contain. We know exactly why the corporations who produce them produce them anyway: people are dumb enough to buy them, and the rules for things marketed as "nutritional supplements" don't prevent them from making a pill with literally no active ingredient.

Well, the logic for pharmacorps isn't any different. If the rules for things marketed as "drugs" allow them to get away with selling pills containing a chemical that just caused people to "show 1% improvement" along some symptom axis in studies, and doctors are dumb enough to [be nudged into] prescribing that pill—why wouldn't they sell them?

The research scientists who found out that the chemical might be beneficial in some way didn't cause any of this, any more than the people who first discovered coal in the ground caused coal power plant pollution. Corporate greed, and a government body with weak "efficacy" standards, are at fault here. The basic research—sloppy or not–is just (unintentional!) grist for their mill.

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That being said: if you are a research scientist, and you want to do what you can to be a check on this system, making your basic research as rigorous as possible, so that they can make conclusions of no effect that the FDA can cite as reasons to reject a pharmacorp's pill—would be useful.

But, very likely, the pharmacorp has more money than your lab does, and so will be able to pay for a higher-powered study than you can afford, that will be sloppy, such that it could prove the opposite conclusion. Your voice, however clear and strong, might just be drowned out anyway.

Really, if we want to fix this problem, the fix needs to come from a different direction. Possibly FDA drug-approval reform, toward something more like a peer-review model (i.e. the pharmacorp gives the FDA money; the FDA uses that money to pay independent labs to rigorously replicate the efficacy study; and then the FDA trusts their independent labs over the pharmacorp's results.)