Biotech is interesting but the regulatory regimes in the US, UK, and rest of the developed world basically stifles innovation -- it costs roughly US $400M to bring a new drug to market, for example, almost all of which is wasted on meeting bureaucratic testing targets rather than going on actual useful trials to determine whether it meets the criteria of efficacy and safety, and to determine the actual side effects. (For example, until relatively recently there was no requirement that medicines be tested on children, the elderly, or women -- as distinct from the usual clinical trials subjects: healthy males aged 21-40. So a lot of our current pharmacopoeia has only been tested on a group that makes up 10% of the population, but will be prescribed across the board for all of us.)

Having said that:

Back in 1986 or thereabouts, Eric Drexler published a set of time-lines for molecular nanotechnology -- an optimistic one, a pessimistic one, and what he deemed a "realistic" middle path. As of 2002, we were slap-bang in the middle of the middle path. The one that leads to assemblers around the 2018-2022 time frame ...

And lest you say that's got no relevance to biotech, let me add that we have an existence proof for nanoassemblers. They're called ribosomes. And one side-effect of the genome and proteome projects is that we're learning how they're programmed and how to make things with them.

Food for thought, there.