Materials science seems to be progressing at decent rate overall right now. On the other hand, I suspect that there's not much money in making a betetr blade (especially not sword-sized ones) compared to making a better car or fighter jet, and the research budgets are sot likely accordingly. Thus, progress in the field of blades might be limited to scraping up the crumbs falling from the table of the "big ones".
As much of materials engineering is in optimising materials for specific applications, useful crumbs for blade-smiths may be few. Much of the current work for example is dedicated to making things lighter, which might not be much use with knives, and possibly directly negative for some swords.
Looking at various material types, ceramics are as usual generally hard and brittle. This allows for a very sharp edge, but will struggle with shock and shearing forces. Advances there might result in tougher materials, but I think it'll be a long time until we see (affordable) ceramics (or ceramic-based composites) reach quite the same toughness as we can get with good steel or similar. As such, ceramics seem to be mostly of interest to knives, as they would appear to have a much higher tolerance for brittle behaviour than swords. Kitchen knives, scalpels and similar being particularity suitable for this (and we already see some such on the market), while survival knives may be slower in adopting ceramics. Another thing speaking against ceramic sword blades are the small series made of such, IIRC ceramics are often difficult to handle with methods suitable for small production runs.
For metals there seems to be some new alloys around for knives, but on the whole I suspect that steel will reign supreme for a very long time to come, as it's simply a very good material for such tasks. The widespread use of steel in our society also means that there's a lot of time and money going into improving steels, and while much of that may be of a limited use to blades (for example creating methods to harden and temper steel which would otherwise have been used unhardened, or improving fatigue resistance far beyond the point which most blades will ever know), some may filter down. Work on steel alloys which can be turned bainitic with greater and greater ease for example might be good for blades, as there seems to be a possibility of reaching greater strength with such steel than with martensitic variants (ie steel which has been hardened and tempered in a traditional fashion) while retaining a suitable hardness. The fact that those working on bainitic steels can throw around the "nano"-buzzword in their funding applications doesn't hurt either (the crystalline structure of bainite being made up of very thin plates, the thickness of which is supposedly down around the nano scale).
The University of Cambridge has some interesting material online relating to bainitic steels:
http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/newbainite.html
http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/2005/bulk.html
http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/bainite.html
http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/2005/current.html
On a longer timeframe, metals with even more exotic microstructures (amorphous, quasicrystalline, nanocrystalline variants, mixes thereof) might present one possible path of evolution, though it might be a bit early to say.