Recent pharmacovigilance (PV) issues have led to questions regarding the ability of the current PV system to meet the global needs. Controversies around the assessment of spontaneous reports and conflicting results from pharmacoepidemiology studies may lead to delay in, or inappropriate, regulatory decisions. The PROTECT consortium, consisting of 20 core partners lead by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA), willdevelop and test methods of proactive monitoring of drug safety and benefit risk (B/R) assessment utilising a large range of EU data sources and expertise. in partnership with EFP1A companies, PROTECT will develop essential parameters, methodologies and algorithms to enable data mining, signal detection and evaluation in various types ofdata-sets including spontaneous reporting, registries and electronic health care databases (EHR). impact analysismethods will be used to enhance signal prioritisation.PROTECT will develop means of combining results from clinical trials, spontaneous reporting and observational data, strengthening continuous B/R monitoring in the post-authorisation phase. Bayesian modelling, multi-criteria decision analysis and other analytical methods will be compared. Methods for graphical expression of B/R will betested with different stakeholders.Collection of data directly from patients is underutilized and may be essential when knowledge of total drug consumption or potential confounders is needed or conventional PV is disrupted. PROTECT will trial direct patient data collection in natural language using web-based, telephone and text messaging systems. As well as testingtransferability of the data into a common language, PROTECT will explore linkage to data from EHR and electronic registries.