Nut Roth Securities?

The Newport Beach-based brokerage formerly known as Cruttenden Roth recently changed its name to Roth Capital Partners -- the sort of moniker one usually associates with a private equity fund or group than a brokerage.

That just shows you how much the brokerage-investment banking game has hanged, said Byron Roth, chairman of Roth Capital.

"What we have been doing is investing a lot in private companies and with venture funds," said Roth. "You can't show up and win the beauty contest (the IPO underwriting) if you haven't been an early-stage investor as well."

Companies often select underwriters from those that believed in them early. With that in mind, Roth Capital partners just hired Fariba Ghodsian in its West Los Angeles office. The former Lehman Bros. analyst who holds a doctorate from Oxford University and MBA from UCLA will be a researcher in the biotech market, which Roth (and many others) think will be the next hot sector to rival Internet firms.

Ghodsian said Los Angeles' biotech world looks a little like the local Internet sector did about three years ago -just before venture capitalists flooded money into Web investments.

Ghodsian is following several local private companies, including Pasadena-based Clinical Microsensors Inc. and Cyrano Inc., both of which came out of the Caltech sphere and deal with DNA and artificial smell technology, respectively, and Urogynesys Inc. in Santa Monica, which is working on possible DNA-related strategies against prostate cancer.

At USC, UCLA and Caltech, and medical centers such as Cedars-Sinai and the City of Hope, some of the components needed for Los Angeles to emerge as a biotech center are in place, said Ghodsian and Roth.

"We just have to get the venture capitalists more interested," Ghodsian said.

Contributing columnist Benjamin Mark Cole writes about the local investment community for the Los Angeles Business Journal.