The article presents abstracts of research papers related to head and neck surgery, which were presented at the seventy-fifth annual meeting of the German Society for Oto-Rhino-Laryngology. The meeting was held from May 19, 2004 to May 23, 2004 in Bad Reichenhall, Germany. One of the research papers was related to tumor-reactive memory T cells in head and neck cancer patients. Optimization of cancer vaccine trials for the treatment of head and neck cancer depends mainly on tumor-reactive T lymphocytes.