You’re describing reproducibility in checking a hypothesis about statistical association. There doesn’t need to be any theory involved to generate that hypothes

You’re describing reproducibility in checking a hypothesis about statistical association. There doesn’t need to be any theory involved to generate that hypothesis. Often there is, but often in modern drug discovery pipeline the lead generation comes first and theory comes later. A theory-based hypothesis in this case would be something like, we think this disease is caused by this specific protein causes a disease, and this drug candidate will bind well to the protein and inhibit the disease causing reaction, so the drug will be useful to treat the disease. There are experiments to be done to check each element in that chain of theory, including the statistical association of disease outcomes