Faculty leaving to get a second degree, see training, etc. Is it heard of in Academia? Is it possible for a faculty to take leave for 1 or 2 years to go and learn some new technologies in order to broaden their research area into a more interdisciplinary area?
Imagine you are working on statistical and computational modelling of cellular dynamics, now you want to go and learn experimental technologies in order to generate your data, validate your results, etc and basically turn into a dry lab/ wet lab instead of a totally computational lab. Is it possible to be funded by your university in order to go and do some self-improvement which would eventually lead to dramatically better research outputs in the future even though it may cause a hit in your short-term output? Something similar to sabbatical leave but not exactly that, as sabbatical leave policies are not funding your goals during the leave and might even stop you from your regular compensations.

I am especially interested in Canada and the US.
The most common way I have seen this occur is through collaboration.

Rather than starting from scratch learning like a student in another professor's lab, the faculty member would start a collaboration with someone at the same or another institution. As part of this collaboration, it is possible to trade and learn skills from each other.

Especially in the situation you describe, it sounds like you have skills that are directly useful to a potential collaborator who has the wet biology background without the computational side, and such a collaboration could increase rather than decrease your productivity.