What patron? If you're an aspiring pharma company developing a new drug to treat some disease, chances are you're being funded through wealthy private investors. Should the company be so fortunate as to have great early clinical results, it will be purchased by a massive Pfizer or Merck. Are you saying that outright fraud, e.g. doctoring data to show a positive result when none such occurred, is a common event? Pretty sure it isn't, and it's not exactly hard to verify most scientific results if the methodology is clear. At the level of the board of directors, it just isn't worth the risk; even if it means declaring bankruptcy on their company, most/all of those guys have connections outside of their business and can find work elsewhere.
If you mean patrons as in the lab tech that fucks up an experiment, and fakes some data to avoid being chewed out/fired, that stuff will almost certainly get caught. The chain of command is too long and there are too many experiments built on each other for someone to not figure it out eventually, assuming the result was significant to the overall project.
If you mean the end consumer, then that's complicated by the fact that we don't really have a free market. Regulations in advertising products can be strict. The factor of cost is usually buried under a complex web of interplay between drug companies, insurance, and government subsidies, meaning consumers don't particularly need to weigh costs and benefits. Consumers are not allowed to consent to purchase new medication on their own; they need the prescription to do so.
And I think moving outside of biotech/drugs (I picked it because it's what I'll probably end up doing once I finish my PhD) it only becomes more clear. No one really cares about the "values" behind designing a better solar panel or space rocket or similar as long as the end product is worth buying. Private-sector research has a strong bias towards application over the theoretical.
