Though I'm still very early into it, I can highly recommend starting a biochemistry degree, if you already have a programming/computer science background. Bioinformatics would be the direct route to that field, but in a bioinformatics degree, there is usually still not much of a focus on the low-level biochemical mechanisms and biochemical methods that form the basis for all the data you will be working with. Biggest downside though is a lot of lab-time, which for me personally is hard as I'm still freelancing on the side.

I'm only in the middle of my second semester and through taking a few biochemistry classes in advance and reading though the papers of our universities research groups it's already starting to come together a bit. Things start to click and I'm getting pretty far in trying to understand and reproducing some SOTA papers in weekend projects. For such a short amount of time of studying the subject, I think that's a pretty good payoff.