Researchers from Boston nonprofit MassBiologics say they have developed a promising new drug to prevent Lyme disease and hope to begin human studies as early as next year.

At a State House briefing yesterday of legislators and their aides, Dr. Mark S. Klempner, the group’s executive vice chancellor, said the medicine is tentatively called Lyme PrEP because it is designed to provide pre-exposure prevention.

People could receive an injection once a year, just before the start of tick season, in April or May, Klempner said, instead of the three doses over six months that had been required for a vaccine that GlaxoSmithKline ultimately withdrew in 2002 after lackluster sales and questions about its safety.

That vaccine also was approved only for people 15 to 70 years old, whereas Lyme PrEP is expected to be safe for all ages.

Unlike a vaccine, the MassBiologics drug is an antibody that binds to and kills the bacteria transmitted from the gut of infected ticks that cause Lyme disease, said Klempner, a professor of medicine at UMass Medical School.

Positive results from mouse studies were presented at two conferences in late 2015, and a paper on the research was peer- reviewed and published last year in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Advancing to human studies will require money — $3.25 million, Klempner estimates, for a Phase 1 trial testing safety and measuring the amount of circulating antibody at different doses in a small number of volunteers.

The time from the completion of that trial to approval of the drug, he said, would depend on the nature and size of subsequent trials with more volunteers.

“It could be as short as three years,” Klempner said, “but that would need to be determined through discussions with the Food and Drug Administration.”

Once on the market, he said, the drug is expected to cost about $200.

“Cost is an important consideration if we are to hope for widespread use,” Klempner said.

“Our goal is to bring it to the public at the lowest possible cost.”

Whether all or a portion of that price would be covered by insurance “would be the next discussion,” said state Rep. James M. Cantwell (D-Marshfield), who hosted yesterday’s briefing and who himself was infected three years ago.

Massachusetts had 2,922 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in 2015, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has statistics.

But the actual number of cases may have been significantly higher because most people are unaware they have been infected unless they find a bull’s eye-shaped rash where a tick has been attached to their skin.