BioNTech is acquiring InstaDeep for £362 million, or about $440 million in initial cash, as part of its efforts to bolster its cancer immunotherapy and vaccine pipelines beyond COVID-19, the company announced Tuesday.

The deal will give BioNTech access to 240 new employees — including teams in artificial intelligence, bio-engineering and data science. InstaDeep shareholders may receive up to about $243 million in performance-based future milestones as part of the transaction.

It also signals a shift in focus to AI and machine learning for BioNTech. InstaDeep will bring its DeepChain platform to BioNTech, which will allow it to embed AI and machine learning-based models across discovery platforms – and connect them to an integrated automated lab infrastructure.

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2023, with InstaDeep operating as a global subsidiary of BioNTech based in the U.K.

“The acquisition of InstaDeep allows us to incorporate the rapidly evolving AI capabilities of the digital world into our technologies, research, drug discovery, manufacturing and deployment processes,” BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said in a statement.

“Our aim is to make BioNTech a technology company where AI is seamlessly integrated into all aspects of work,” Sahin added.

BioNTech, which rose to fame alongside partner Pfizer in developing the COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty, brought in some $18.2 billion in revenue from that vaccine in 2022. Now, the company is putting that money to work in the hopes that it will help its other biotech ambitions forward.

Some of those include treatments that employ mRNA technology for cancer, as well as innovative chimeric antigen receptor T cells, bispecific immune checkpoint modulators and targeted cancer antibodies. BioNTech has also been investing in mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases beyond COVID-19.

The InstaDeep acquisition came less than a week after rival COVID-19 manufacturer Moderna announced its first acquisition since its inception, purchasing small Japanese biotech OriCiro Genomics K.K. for $85 million.

The latest deal is part of a shared history between BioNTech and InstaDeep. In November 2020, BioNTech and InstaDeep formed a multi-year collaboration to bring AI and machine learning to cancer and infectious disease drug development, including launching an AI Innovation Lab.

The AI Innovation Lab aimed to combine InstaDeep’s AI capabilities with BioNTech’s expertise in immunotherapies. That collaboration focused on three areas, including novel drug design, advanced analytics and manufacturing as well as supply chain optimization.

“Together, we envision building a world leader that combines biopharmaceutical research and AI with the aim to design next-generation immunotherapies that enhance medical care — thus, helping fight cancer and other diseases,” Karim Beguir, CEO and co-founder of InstaDeep, said in a statement about the latest acquisition.