Charles Fleischman’s company is a textbook example of how to take a start-up biomedical firm and turn it into a multimillion-dollar corporation.

“We were an instant, overnight success that took 15 years,” said Fleischman, who is the outgoing president, chief financial officer and chief operating officer of Gaithersburg-based Digene, a company that last year pulled in more than $150 million on sales of its HPV test, which screens for the cervical cancer-causing human papillomavirus. “The first half of the 1990s, we focused on creating the technology platform. The second half, we were validating the (product) in clinical trials worldwide. The first half of this decade was spent running the gauntlet of FDA approval, and now we’re in full commercialization mode.”