I don't think academic research has to focus on diseases in the first place. I would appreciate if more money would be invested into finding better ways to measure drug toxicity levels. That's no disease and therefore it's underfunded.

DNA sequencing is a success story of the last decades. It's no disease itself but was a worthwhile investment.

It makes sense to spend money research AIDS not only because curing AIDS is a good idea. AIDS patients are a population where you can ethically try a lot of high risk interventions for interacting with the human immune system.