People I know in big pharma companies have told me they first try to reproduce promising academic results before they invest a lot of money in further research,

People I know in big pharma companies have told me they first try to reproduce promising academic results before they invest a lot of money in further research, and that 70%+ of the time they fail to reproduce the results. This came up in conversation years ago when the "reproducibility crisis" first became a hot topic. Other acquaintances of mine, who are in academia, did not find these results surprising at all. In fact, one added the observation that even when the experimental results can be duplicated, the conclusions of the study are probably still not valid because alternative, more mundane explanations are often overlooked, and the peer review process these days doesn't apply sufficient scrutiny or skepticism toward this. I don't have any anecdotes on US vs. Japanese research.