The SEC was founded in 1975 by Drs. Dennis Slone and Samuel Shapiro at the Boston University School of Medicine as the Drug Epidemiology Unit. Following Dr. Slone's death in 1982, his colleagues honored his memory by renaming the group the Slone Epidemiology Unit. In 2001, the University's Board of Trustees elevated the group to become the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University.

Over the years, Slone investigators have been supported by grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), other government agencies, the pharmaceutical industry, and private foundations. Slone works in partnership with hundreds of hospitals and thousands of health care providers, both nationally and internationally. Among the many studies conducted by the SEC, examples include:

• A multicenter case/control study of illnesses requiring hospital admission in relation to medication use ("Case-Control Surveillance"), which has collected data since 1976 from over 80,000 adults.
  
• A long-term case-control birth defects study ("Birth Defects Study"), which for over 25 years has assessed the risks of birth defects in relation to medications taken during pregnancy; the database currently has information on over 32,700 mother-child pairs.
  
• The Black Women's Health Study ("BWHS"; www.bu.edu/bwhs), which began in 1995 and assesses risk factors for cancers and other major illnesses in black women, in a prospective follow-up study of over 60,000 African-American women.
  
• The Boston University Fever Study ("BUFS"), a large/simple randomized clinical trial that assessed the safety of pediatric ibuprofen prior to its switch from a prescription product to one available over-the-counter. The study involved over 84,000 children recruited by a Slone network of over 1700 physicians.
  
• An international study of anaphylactic shock, conducted in Hungary, Spain, Sweden, and India, that determined how often these life-threatening reactions occur in users of various medications;
  
• The Thalidomide Survey, a study designed to assess the effectiveness of S.T.E.P.S, the manufacturer's risk management program that is focused on pregnancy prevention.
  

A major new initiative is the Slone Survey, an ongoing telephone survey that provides current population-based information on the use of all medications in the United States - including prescription and over-the-counter drugs, vitamins and minerals, and herbal preparations and other natural supplements.