I agree that great advances in biotech have come from bioengineering (all the way back to Genentech, the first biotech company) and I think that a lot of great

I agree that great advances in biotech have come from bioengineering (all the way back to Genentech, the first biotech company) and I think that a lot of great advances in biotech will continue to come from bioengineering. But the narrative that "biotech is becoming more like software" basically ignores the fact that engineering's impact in biotech is limited by our understanding of biology. The biggest challenge in drug discovery is that most targets arent good, and most disease models and in vitro systems are poorly correlated with clinical outcomes You can engineer all you want, but if you are engineering a drug to optimally bind a target that isnt actually important for disease, all that engineering is wasted. Big pharma companies thought they could "solve" drug discovery with engineering / efficiency improvements in the early days of high throughput screening, but that only works if your biology is correct The exciting thing about checkpoint inhibitors for cancer is that their targets are actually really important in cancer's strategy to avoid the immune system. The engineering work required is very impressive as well and built upon decades of innovation in that field, but the big pharma companies had a lot of that engineering expertise already I believe. Once they learned the importance of PD-1 / PD-L1 they could execute development campaigns using their existing infrastructure