Joint replacements, particularly at the hip, and bone fixation devices have become very successful applications of materials in medicine. The use of pins, plates, and screws for bone fixation to aid recovery of bone fractures has become routine, with the number of annual procedures approaching five million in the United States alone. In joint replacement, typical patients are age 55 or older and suffer from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, or osteoporosis. Orthopedic surgeries for artificial joints exceed 1.5 million each year, with actual joint replacement accounting for about half of the procedures. A major focus of research is the development of new biomaterials for artificial joints intended for younger, more active patients.

Hip-joint replacements are principally used for structural support. Consequently, they are dominated by materials that possess high strength, such as metals, tough plastics, and reinforced polymer-matrix composites. In addition, biomaterials used for orthopedic applications must have high modulus, long-term dimensional stability, high fatigue resistance, long-term biostability, excellent abrasion resistance, and biocompatibility (i.e., there should be no adverse tissue response to the implanted device). Early developments in this field used readily available materials such as stainless steels, but evidence of corrosion after implantation led to their replacement by more stable materials, particularly titanium alloys, cobalt-chromium-molybdenum alloys, and carbon fibre-reinforced polymer composites. A typical modern artificial hip consists of a nitrided and highly polished cobalt-chromium ball connected to a titanium alloy stem that is inserted into the femur and cemented into place by in situ polymerization of polymethylmethacrylate. The articulating component of the joint consists of an acetabular cup made of tough, creep-resistant, ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene. Abrasion at the ball-and-cup interface can lead to the production of wear particles, which in turn can lead to significant inflammatory reaction by the host. Consequently, much research on the development of hip-joint materials has been devoted to optimizing the properties of the articulating components in order to eliminate surface wear. Other modifications include porous coatings made by sintering the metal surface or coatings of wire mesh or hydroxyapatite; these promote bone growth and integration between the implant and the host, eliminating the need for an acrylic bone cement.

While the strength of the biomaterials is important, another goal is to match the mechanical properties of the implant materials with those of the bone in order to provide a uniform distribution of stresses (load sharing). If a bone is loaded insufficiently, the stress distribution will be made asymmetric, and this will lead to adaptive remodeling with cortical thinning and increased porosity of the bone. Such lessons in structure hierarchy and in the structure-property relationships of materials have been obtained from studies on biologic composite materials, and they are being translated into new classes of synthetic biomaterials. One development is carbon fibre-reinforced polymer-matrix composites. Typical matrix polymers include polysulfone and polyetheretherketones. The strength of these composites is lower than that of metals, but it more closely approximates that of bone.