I think the challenge is learning enough of the biology outside of academia. I think it is fully possible, e.g. from books and videos ... but will take a lot of

I think the challenge is learning enough of the biology outside of academia. I think it is fully possible, e.g. from books and videos ... but will take a lot of determination. For the bioinformatics part, I think something like the "Genomics data science" specialization on Coursera should be a pretty good start.