Yes to this. At the Very Big Pharma where I work about 20 years ago we took some baby steps toward adopting an engineering approach toward bio-based systems en

Yes to this. At the Very Big Pharma where I work about 20 years ago we took some baby steps toward adopting an engineering approach toward bio-based systems engineering. Systems biology and in silico modeling of disease had long promised to short circuit the protracted process of drug development. And maybe one day that may yet prove true. But after 15 years of building models of disease or therapy based on data gleaned from lab assays and preclinical/ clinical studies, we found that there were still far too many 'degrees of freedom' in the parameter space of interest to convince the biologists that our models could add sufficient real value to their work for our work to continue. Fortunately, medicinal chemists have fared better in silico, often employing computational techniques to reduce their search space for a compound desired behavior. But I think no one would describe their models of molecular docking / binding as manifestations of engineering or systems biology.