Panama’s Clinical-Trial Docket Is a Public Excel File. The Industry Still Treats the Country as Opaque.

Panama’s health-research docket is a no-login public Excel file, so calling the country opaque is now a file-handling failure.

I still hear the same sentence about Panama: small country, hard to see what is running, so treat it as a black box.

That sentence is now a file-handling failure.

On 23 April 2026, Panama published Decreto Ejecutivo No. 21 in Gaceta Oficial Digital No. 30510-C.1 The decree reglamenta Títulos III and IV of Ley 84 of 14 May 2019, the statute that already gave the country a health-research law.1,2 Artículo 2, numeral 9 of the decree names the tool: Plataforma web RESEGIS, the Ministerio de Salud platform for registro y seguimiento of health-research projects.1

MINSA did not hide that list behind a consultant login.

The official Guía introductoria a la Plataforma RESEGIS is blunt. “Para ver la lista pública de los protocolos de investigación registrados no es necesario tener un usuario activo en la plataforma, cualquier persona puede ver y acceder a la lista pública.” The same page tells you how to download that list as Excel. A second no-login module, “Ver estadísticas,” is open the same way.3

The live public table sits at the no-login RESEGIS list.4 The columns are not a teaser. They include consecutivo, Estado en MINSA, Seguimiento CBI, title, principal investigator, site, corregimiento, registration date, health region, institutional ethics committee, ethics-approval date, funder, Universal Trial Number, executor, and enrollment status.4 You do not need a RESEGIS user to open that page. You need a browser.

I pulled the public table on 28 August 2026. It had 1,890 rows. 1,808 were REGISTRADO. 72 were EVALUADO. Ten were EN EVALUACION.4 That is a general health-research docket, not a device-only register. Some rows look like platform tests. Filter before you brief a board. Do not treat a row as a bioaccess® study unless that fact is already on bioaccessla.com.

The public file is the protocol list, not the whole platform. Investigator follow-up and CBI follow-up screens are login-gated. That is a user role. It is not a reason to call the docket secret. The list MINSA told the public to download is the list that is already public.

The industry still writes Panama as if Ley 84 were the last word and the country were too small to track. Decreto 21 switched the registry language on. The consultants who still sell “Panama opacity” have not opened the Excel.

What the decree actually changed for a trial, as opposed to a tourist brochure, is narrower than a destination essay and more useful.

Artículo 19 splits committee accreditation. Tipo I is limited to minimum-risk work, or a minor increase above that floor. Tipo II covers that set plus intervention research, including clinical trials.1 A first-in-human device protocol is not a Tipo I file. If the ethics committee on the row is not accredited for trials, you do not have a trial committee. You have a paperwork problem.

Artículo 44 is the ordinary ethics clock: a maximum of twenty business days from a complete file. That is the first-instance CBI review. Do not collapse it into the separate CNBI-as-superior-instance clock.

Artículo 79 says a clinical trial’s details must be in a publicly available, freely consultable registry that meets WHO standards before the trial starts in Panama. Artículo 82 says the accredited committee must see the comprobante del registro before it certifies approval or exemption. The Excel is not a courtesy. It is the public face of a file the decree already made a start condition.

Artículo 91 is the high-risk line. MINSA’s evaluation of those protocols and the ethics review se realizarán simultáneamente. The MINSA review does not stop the committee clock.1 A clinical-trial authorization and a commercial MINSA registration are still different files. The public RESEGIS list does not give you a sanitary registration, and a sanitary registration does not authorize an investigational lot.

The 20 May 2026 bioaccess® reading already published that split.5,6 The article numbers above are the cite.

That is the operational point. Opacity was the old excuse for skipping Panama diligence. The current failure mode is the opposite: paying someone to describe a country whose protocol list is already a public spreadsheet.

Open the list before you write the feasibility memo. Confirm the committee type, the MINSA estado, the site, and whether a UTN exists. If the row is not there, you do not have a registered protocol. If the row is there and the estado is EN EVALUACION, you do not have a start. If the title is a test string, you do not have a study.

I am not asking anyone to treat Panama as large. I am asking them to stop calling a no-login Excel an intelligence gap.

Related bioaccess® pages

References

  1. República de Panamá, Ministerio de Salud, Decreto Ejecutivo No. 21 de 23 de abril de 2026, “Que reglamenta los Títulos III y IV de la Ley 84 de 14 de mayo de 2019,” Gaceta Oficial Digital No. 30510-C (jueves 23 de abril de 2026). Official PDF: https://minsa.b-cdn.net/sites/default/files/publicacion-general/decreto_ejecutivo_no_21_de_23_de_abril_de_2026_-_reglamenta_titulos_iii_y_iv_ley_84_de_14-5-2019_investigacion_en_salud.pdf
  2. Ministerio de Salud de Panamá, Regulación de Investigación para la Salud (Ley 84 de 14 de mayo de 2019; Decreto Ejecutivo N. 21 de 23 de abril de 2026). https://www.minsa.gob.pa/informacion-salud/regulacion-de-investigacion-para-la-salud
  3. Ministerio de Salud de Panamá, Guía introductoria a la Plataforma RESEGIS. “Para ver la lista pública de los protocolos de investigación registrados no es necesario tener un usuario activo en la plataforma, cualquier persona puede ver y acceder a la lista pública.” Official PDF: https://www.minsa.gob.pa/sites/default/files/publicacion-general/guia_introductoria_a_la_plataforma_resegis_0.pdf
  4. Plataforma RESEGIS, Lista de Proyectos (no-login public table). https://resegis2.integrait.co/index.php/listprojects. Snapshot on disk 28 August 2026: 1,890 public rows.
  5. Julio G. Martinez-Clark, “Panama’s Decreto 21 of 2026: What the New Clinical Research Rules Mean for Sponsors,” bioaccess®, 20 May 2026. https://bioaccessla.com/blog/panama-decreto-21-2026-clinical-research-regulation-what-sponsors-need-to-know
  6. bioaccess®, “Clinical trials in Panama.” https://bioaccessla.com/clinical-trials-panama

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